r  e  a  d  i  n  g  s        i  n 
ÆSTHETICS

edited by jose mario o mandia  first edition taipei, august 2004

CONTENTS
Letter to Artists (1999)
His Holiness Pope John Paul II
"The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty”
Card. Joseph Ratzinger
Aristotle's theory of art and his analysis of the beautiful
William Turner
On Goodness and Beauty
St Thomas Aquinas
On the Aesthetic Visio
St Thomas Aquinas
On the Formal Criteria of Beauty
St Thomas Aquinas
On Nature vs Art
St Thomas Aquinas
Art and Beauty
Jacques Maritain
The Idea of Beauty
Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
Some Thoughts on Beauty
Mortimer Adler, Ph.D.
Beauty, Contemplation and the Virgin Mary [1]
Sr. Thomas Mary McBride, O.P.
The Modern Divorce of Art and Prudence from Nature
Benedict Ashley
On Art
Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
Æsthetics
G Gietmann
Kant and the "Critique of Judgment"
Radical Academy

Letter to Artists (1999)
His Holiness Pope John Paul II

To all who are passionately dedicated to the search for new “epiphanies” of beauty so that through their creative work as artists they may offer these as gifts to the world.
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gn 1:31)
The artist, image of God the Creator
1. None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when—like the artists of every age—captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colours and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.
That is why it seems to me that there are no better words than the text of Genesis with which to begin my Letter to you, to whom I feel closely linked by experiences reaching far back in time and which have indelibly marked my life. In writing this Letter, I intend to follow the path of the fruitful dialogue between the Church and artists which has gone on unbroken through two thousand years of history, and which still, at the threshold of the Third Millennium, offers rich promise for the future.
In fact, this dialogue is not dictated merely by historical accident or practical need, but is rooted in the very essence of both religious experience and artistic creativity. The opening page of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image of God as Creator. This relationship is particularly clear in the Polish language because of the lexical link between the words stwórca (creator) and twórca (craftsman).
What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing—ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it—and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God. In fact, after saying that God created man and woman “in his image” (cf. Gn 1:27), the Bible adds that he entrusted to them the task of dominating the earth (cf. Gn 1:28). This was the last day of creation (cf. Gn 1:28-31). On the previous days, marking as it were the rhythm of the birth of the cosmos, Yahweh had created the universe. Finally he created the human being, the noblest fruit of his design, to whom he subjected the visible world as a vast field in which human inventiveness might assert itself.
God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman's task. Through his “artistic creativity” man appears more than ever “in the image of God”, and he accomplishes this task above all in shaping the wondrous “material” of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over the universe which surrounds him. With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. Obviously, this is a sharing which leaves intact the infinite distance between the Creator and the creature, as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa made clear: “Creative art, which it is the soul's good fortune to entertain, is not to be identified with that essential art which is God himself, but is only a communication of it and a share in it”.(1)
That is why artists, the more conscious they are of their “gift”, are led all the more to see themselves and the whole of creation with eyes able to contemplate and give thanks, and to raise to God a hymn of praise. This is the only way for them to come to a full understanding of themselves, their vocation and their mission.
The special vocation of the artist
2. Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.
It is important to recognize the distinction, but also the connection, between these two aspects of human activity. The distinction is clear. It is one thing for human beings to be the authors of their own acts, with responsibility for their moral value; it is another to be an artist, able, that is, to respond to the demands of art and faithfully to accept art's specific dictates.(2) This is what makes the artist capable of producing objects, but it says nothing as yet of his moral character. We are speaking not of moulding oneself, of forming one's own personality, but simply of actualizing one's productive capacities, giving aesthetic form to ideas conceived in the mind.
The distinction between the moral and artistic aspects is fundamental, but no less important is the connection between them. Each conditions the other in a profound way. In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are. And there are endless examples of this in human history. In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth. Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women. Works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life, and they reveal the original contribution which artists offer to the history of culture.
The artistic vocation in the service of beauty
3. A noted Polish poet, Cyprian Norwid, wrote that “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up”.(3)
The theme of beauty is decisive for a discourse on art. It was already present when I stressed God's delighted gaze upon creation. In perceiving that all he had created was good, God saw that it was beautiful as well.(4) The link between good and beautiful stirs fruitful reflection. In a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty. This was well understood by the Greeks who, by fusing the two concepts, coined a term which embraces both: kalokagathía, or beauty-goodness. On this point Plato writes: “The power of the Good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful”.(5)
It is in living and acting that man establishes his relationship with being, with the truth and with the good. The artist has a special relationship to beauty. In a very true sense it can be said that beauty is the vocation bestowed on him by the Creator in the gift of “artistic talent”. And, certainly, this too is a talent which ought to be made to bear fruit, in keeping with the sense of the Gospel parable of the talents (cf. Mt 25:14-30).
Here we touch on an essential point. Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation—as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor and so on—feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it at the service of their neighbour and of humanity as a whole.
The artist and the common good
4. Society needs artists, just as it needs scientists, technicians, workers, professional people, witnesses of the faith, teachers, fathers and mothers, who ensure the growth of the person and the development of the community by means of that supreme art form which is “the art of education”. Within the vast cultural panorama of each nation, artists have their unique place. Obedient to their inspiration in creating works both worthwhile and beautiful, they not only enrich the cultural heritage of each nation and of all humanity, but they also render an exceptional social service in favour of the common good.
The particular vocation of individual artists decides the arena in which they serve and points as well to the tasks they must assume, the hard work they must endure and the responsibility they must accept. Artists who are conscious of all this know too that they must labour without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves. There is therefore an ethic, even a “spirituality” of artistic service, which contributes in its way to the life and renewal of a people. It is precisely this to which Cyprian Norwid seems to allude in declaring that “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up”.
Art and the mystery of the Word made flesh
5. The Law of the Old Testament explicitly forbids representation of the invisible and ineffable God by means of “graven or molten image” (Dt 27:15), because God transcends every material representation: “I am who I am” (Ex 3:14). Yet in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Son of God becomes visible in person: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son born of woman” (Gal 4:4). God became man in Jesus Christ, who thus becomes “the central point of reference for an understanding of the enigma of human existence, the created world and God himself”.(6)
This prime epiphany of “God who is Mystery” is both an encouragement and a challenge to Christians, also at the level of artistic creativity. From it has come a flowering of beauty which has drawn its sap precisely from the mystery of the Incarnation. In becoming man, the Son of God has introduced into human history all the evangelical wealth of the true and the good, and with this he has also unveiled a new dimension of beauty, of which the Gospel message is filled to the brim.
Sacred Scripture has thus become a sort of “immense vocabulary” (Paul Claudel) and “iconographic atlas” (Marc Chagall), from which both Christian culture and art have drawn. The Old Testament, read in the light of the New, has provided endless streams of inspiration. From the stories of the Creation and sin, the Flood, the cycle of the Patriarchs, the events of the Exodus to so many other episodes and characters in the history of salvation, the biblical text has fired the imagination of painters, poets, musicians, playwrights and film-makers. A figure like Job, to take but one example, with his searing and ever relevant question of suffering, still arouses an interest which is not just philosophical but literary and artistic as well. And what should we say of the New Testament? From the Nativity to Golgotha, from the Transfiguration to the Resurrection, from the miracles to the teachings of Christ, and on to the events recounted in the Acts of the Apostles or foreseen by the Apocalypse in an eschatological key, on countless occasions the biblical word has become image, music and poetry, evoking the mystery of “the Word made flesh” in the language of art.
In the history of human culture, all of this is a rich chapter of faith and beauty. Believers above all have gained from it in their experience of prayer and Christian living. Indeed for many of them, in times when few could read or write, representations of the Bible were a concrete mode of catechesis.(7) But for everyone, believers or not, the works of art inspired by Scripture remain a reflection of the unfathomable mystery which engulfs and inhabits the world.
A fruitful alliance between the Gospel and art
6. Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality's surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery. The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning to one's own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things. All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.
Believers find nothing strange in this: they know that they have had a momentary glimpse of the abyss of light which has its original wellspring in God. Is it in any way surprising that this leaves the spirit overwhelmed as it were, so that it can only stammer in reply? True artists above all are ready to acknowledge their limits and to make their own the words of the Apostle Paul, according to whom “God does not dwell in shrines made by human hands” so that “we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold or silver or stone, a representation by human art and imagination” (Acts 17:24, 29). If the intimate reality of things is always “beyond” the powers of human perception, how much more so is God in the depths of his unfathomable mystery!
The knowledge conferred by faith is of a different kind: it presupposes a personal encounter with God in Jesus Christ. Yet this knowledge too can be enriched by artistic intuition. An eloquent example of aesthetic contemplation sublimated in faith are, for example, the works of Fra Angelico. No less notable in this regard is the ecstatic lauda, which Saint Francis of Assisi twice repeats in the chartula which he composed after receiving the stigmata of Christ on the mountain of La Verna: “You are beauty... You are beauty!”.(8) Saint Bonaventure comments: “In things of beauty, he contemplated the One who is supremely beautiful, and, led by the footprints he found in creatures, he followed the Beloved everywhere”.(9)
A corresponding approach is found in Eastern spirituality where Christ is described as “the supremely Beautiful, possessed of a beauty above all the children of earth”.(10) Macarius the Great speaks of the transfiguring and liberating beauty of the Risen Lord in these terms: “The soul which has been fully illumined by the unspeakable beauty of the glory shining on the countenance of Christ overflows with the Holy Spirit... it is all eye, all light, all countenance”.(11)
Every genuine art form in its own way is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world. It is therefore a wholly valid approach to the realm of faith, which gives human experience its ultimate meaning. That is why the Gospel fullness of truth was bound from the beginning to stir the interest of artists, who by their very nature are alert to every “epiphany” of the inner beauty of things.
The origins
7. The art which Christianity encountered in its early days was the ripe fruit of the classical world, articulating its aesthetic canons and embodying its values. Not only in their way of living and thinking, but also in the field of art, faith obliged Christians to a discernment which did not allow an uncritical acceptance of this heritage. Art of Christian inspiration began therefore in a minor key, strictly tied to the need for believers to contrive Scripture-based signs to express both the mysteries of faith and a “symbolic code” by which they could distinguish and identify themselves, especially in the difficult times of persecution. Who does not recall the symbols which marked the first appearance of an art both pictorial and plastic? The fish, the loaves, the shepherd: in evoking the mystery, they became almost imperceptibly the first traces of a new art.
When the Edict of Constantine allowed Christians to declare themselves in full freedom, art became a privileged means for the expression of faith. Majestic basilicas began to appear, and in them the architectural canons of the pagan world were reproduced and at the same time modified to meet the demands of the new form of worship. How can we fail to recall at least the old Saint Peter's Basilica and the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, both funded by Constantine himself? Or Constantinople's Hagia Sophia built by Justinian, with its splendours of Byzantine art?
While architecture designed the space for worship, gradually the need to contemplate the mystery and to present it explicitly to the simple people led to the early forms of painting and sculpture. There appeared as well the first elements of art in word and sound. Among the many themes treated by Augustine we find De Musica; and Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose, Prudentius, Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory of Nazianzus and Paulinus of Nola, to mention but a few, promoted a Christian poetry which was often of high quality not just as theology but also as literature. Their poetic work valued forms inherited from the classical authors, but was nourished by the pure sap of the Gospel, as Paulinus of Nola put it succinctly: “Our only art is faith and our music Christ”.(12) A little later, Gregory the Great compiled the Antiphonarium and thus laid the ground for the organic development of that most original sacred music which takes its name from him. Gregorian chant, with its inspired modulations, was to become down the centuries the music of the Church's faith in the liturgical celebration of the sacred mysteries. The “beautiful” was thus wedded to the “true”, so that through art too souls might be lifted up from the world of the senses to the eternal.
Along this path there were troubled moments. Precisely on the issue of depicting the Christian mystery, there arose in the early centuries a bitter controversy known to history as “the iconoclast crisis”. Sacred images, which were already widely used in Christian devotion, became the object of violent contention. The Council held at Nicaea in 787, which decreed the legitimacy of images and their veneration, was a historic event not just for the faith but for culture itself. The decisive argument to which the Bishops appealed in order to settle the controversy was the mystery of the Incarnation: if the Son of God had come into the world of visible realities—his humanity building a bridge between the visible and the invisible— then, by analogy, a representation of the mystery could be used, within the logic of signs, as a sensory evocation of the mystery. The icon is venerated not for its own sake, but points beyond to the subject which it represents.(13)
The Middle Ages
8. The succeeding centuries saw a great development of Christian art. In the East, the art of the icon continued to flourish, obeying theological and aesthetic norms charged with meaning and sustained by the conviction that, in a sense, the icon is a sacrament. By analogy with what occurs in the sacraments, the icon makes present the mystery of the Incarnation in one or other of its aspects. That is why the beauty of the icon can be best appreciated in a church where in the shadows burning lamps stir infinite flickerings of light. As Pavel Florensky has written: “By the flat light of day, gold is crude, heavy, useless, but by the tremulous light of a lamp or candle it springs to life and glitters in sparks beyond counting—now here, now there, evoking the sense of other lights, not of this earth, which fill the space of heaven”.(14)
In the West, artists start from the most varied viewpoints, depending also on the underlying convictions of the cultural world of their time. The artistic heritage built up over the centuries includes a vast array of sacred works of great inspiration, which still today leave the observer full of admiration. In the first place, there are the great buildings for worship, in which the functional is always wedded to the creative impulse inspired by a sense of the beautiful and an intuition of the mystery. From here came the various styles well known in the history of art. The strength and simplicity of the Romanesque, expressed in cathedrals and abbeys, slowly evolved into the soaring splendours of the Gothic. These forms portray not only the genius of an artist but the soul of a people. In the play of light and shadow, in forms at times massive, at times delicate, structural considerations certainly come into play, but so too do the tensions peculiar to the experience of God, the mystery both “awesome” and “alluring”. How is one to summarize with a few brief references to each of the many different art forms, the creative power of the centuries of the Christian Middle Ages? An entire culture, albeit with the inescapable limits of all that is human, had become imbued with the Gospel; and where theology produced the Summa of Saint Thomas, church art moulded matter in a way which led to adoration of the mystery, and a wonderful poet like Dante Alighieri could compose “the sacred poem, to which both heaven and earth have turned their hand”,(15) as he himself described the Divine Comedy.
Humanism and the Renaissance
9. The favourable cultural climate that produced the extraordinary artistic flowering of Humanism and the Renaissance also had a significant impact on the way in which the artists of the period approached the religious theme. Naturally, their inspiration, like their style, varied greatly, at least among the best of them. But I do not intend to repeat things which you, as artists, know well. Writing from this Apostolic Palace, which is a mine of masterpieces perhaps unique in the world, I would rather give voice to the supreme artists who in this place lavished the wealth of their genius, often charged with great spiritual depth. From here can be heard the voice of Michelangelo who in the Sistine Chapel has presented the drama and mystery of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgement, giving a face to God the Father, to Christ the Judge, and to man on his arduous journey from the dawn to the consummation of history. Here speaks the delicate and profound genius of Raphael, highlighting in the array of his paintings, and especially in the “Dispute” in the Room of the Signatura, the mystery of the revelation of the Triune God, who in the Eucharist befriends man and sheds light on the questions and expectations of human intelligence. From this place, from the majestic Basilica dedicated to the Prince of the Apostles, from the Colonnade which spreads out from it like two arms open to welcome the whole human family, we still hear Bramante, Bernini, Borromini, Maderno, to name only the more important artists, all rendering visible the perception of the mystery which makes of the Church a universally hospitable community, mother and travelling companion to all men and women in their search for God.
This extraordinary complex is a remarkably powerful expression of sacred art, rising to heights of imperishable aesthetic and religious excellence. What has characterized sacred art more and more, under the impulse of Humanism and the Renaissance, and then of successive cultural and scientific trends, is a growing interest in everything human, in the world, and in the reality of history. In itself, such a concern is not at all a danger for Christian faith, centred on the mystery of the Incarnation and therefore on God's valuing of the human being. The great artists mentioned above are a demonstration of this. Suffice it to think of the way in which Michelangelo represents the beauty of the human body in his painting and sculpture.(16)
Even in the changed climate of more recent centuries, when a part of society seems to have become indifferent to faith, religious art has continued on its way. This can be more widely appreciated if we look beyond the figurative arts to the great development of sacred music through this same period, either composed for the liturgy or simply treating religious themes. Apart from the many artists who made sacred music their chief concern—how can we forget Pier Luigi da Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Tomás Luis de Victoria?—it is also true that many of the great composers—from Handel to Bach, from Mozart to Schubert, from Beethoven to Berlioz, from Liszt to Verdi—have given us works of the highest inspiration in this field.
Towards a renewed dialogue
10. It is true nevertheless that, in the modern era, alongside this Christian humanism which has continued to produce important works of culture and art, another kind of humanism, marked by the absence of God and often by opposition to God, has gradually asserted itself. Such an atmosphere has sometimes led to a separation of the world of art and the world of faith, at least in the sense that many artists have a diminished interest in religious themes.
You know, however, that the Church has not ceased to nurture great appreciation for the value of art as such. Even beyond its typically religious expressions, true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience. In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.
It is clear, therefore, why the Church is especially concerned for the dialogue with art and is keen that in our own time there be a new alliance with artists, as called for by my revered predecessor Paul VI in his vibrant speech to artists during a special meeting he had with them in the Sistine Chapel on 7 May 1964.(17) From such cooperation the Church hopes for a renewed “epiphany” of beauty in our time and apt responses to the particular needs of the Christian community.
In the spirit of the Second Vatican Council
11. The Second Vatican Council laid the foundation for a renewed relationship between the Church and culture, with immediate implications for the world of art. This is a relationship offered in friendship, openness and dialogue. In the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, the Fathers of the Council stressed “the great importance” of literature and the arts in human life: “They seek to probe the true nature of man, his problems and experiences, as he strives to know and perfect himself and the world, to discover his place in history and the universe, to portray his miseries and joys, his needs and strengths, with a view to a better future”.(18)
On this basis, at the end of the Council the Fathers addressed a greeting and an appeal to artists: “This world—they said—in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. Beauty, like truth, brings joy to the human heart and is that precious fruit which resists the erosion of time, which unites generations and enables them to be one in admiration!”.(19) In this spirit of profound respect for beauty, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium recalled the historic friendliness of the Church towards art and, referring more specifically to sacred art, the “summit” of religious art, did not hesitate to consider artists as having “a noble ministry” when their works reflect in some way the infinite beauty of God and raise people's minds to him.(20) Thanks also to the help of artists “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind”.(21) In this light, it comes as no surprise when Father Marie Dominique Chenu claims that the work of the historian of theology would be incomplete if he failed to give due attention to works of art, both literary and figurative, which are in their own way “not only aesthetic representations, but genuine 'sources' of theology”.(22)
The Church needs art
12. In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery.
The Church has need especially of those who can do this on the literary and figurative level, using the endless possibilities of images and their symbolic force. Christ himself made extensive use of images in his preaching, fully in keeping with his willingness to become, in the Incarnation, the icon of the unseen God.
The Church also needs musicians. How many sacred works have been composed through the centuries by people deeply imbued with the sense of the mystery! The faith of countless believers has been nourished by melodies flowing from the hearts of other believers, either introduced into the liturgy or used as an aid to dignified worship. In song, faith is experienced as vibrant joy, love, and confident expectation of the saving intervention of God.
The Church needs architects, because she needs spaces to bring the Christian people together and celebrate the mysteries of salvation. After the terrible destruction of the last World War and the growth of great cities, a new generation of architects showed themselves adept at responding to the exigencies of Christian worship, confirming that the religious theme can still inspire architectural design in our own day. Not infrequently these architects have constructed churches which are both places of prayer and true works of art.
Does art need the Church?
13. The Church therefore needs art. But can it also be said that art needs the Church? The question may seem like a provocation. Yet, rightly understood, it is both legitimate and profound. Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable. How then can we fail to see what a great source of inspiration is offered by that kind of homeland of the soul that is religion? Is it not perhaps within the realm of religion that the most vital personal questions are posed, and answers both concrete and definitive are sought?
In fact, the religious theme has been among those most frequently treated by artists in every age. The Church has always appealed to their creative powers in interpreting the Gospel message and discerning its precise application in the life of the Christian community. This partnership has been a source of mutual spiritual enrichment. Ultimately, it has been a great boon for an understanding of man, of the authentic image and truth of the person. The special bond between art and Christian revelation has also become evident. This does not mean that human genius has not found inspiration in other religious contexts. It is enough to recall the art of the ancient world, especially Greek and Roman art, or the art which still flourishes in the very ancient civilizations of the East. It remains true, however, that because of its central doctrine of the Incarnation of the Word of God, Christianity offers artists a horizon especially rich in inspiration. What an impoverishment it would be for art to abandon the inexhaustible mine of the Gospel!
An appeal to artists
14. With this Letter, I turn to you, the artists of the world, to assure you of my esteem and to help consolidate a more constructive partnership between art and the Church. Mine is an invitation to rediscover the depth of the spiritual and religious dimension which has been typical of art in its noblest forms in every age. It is with this in mind that I appeal to you, artists of the written and spoken word, of the theatre and music, of the plastic arts and the most recent technologies in the field of communication. I appeal especially to you, Christian artists: I wish to remind each of you that, beyond functional considerations, the close alliance that has always existed between the Gospel and art means that you are invited to use your creative intuition to enter into the heart of the mystery of the Incarnate God and at the same time into the mystery of man.
Human beings, in a certain sense, are unknown to themselves. Jesus Christ not only reveals God, but “fully reveals man to man”.(23) In Christ, God has reconciled the world to himself. All believers are called to bear witness to this; but it is up to you, men and women who have given your lives to art, to declare with all the wealth of your ingenuity that in Christ the world is redeemed: the human person is redeemed, the human body is redeemed, and the whole creation which, according to Saint Paul, “awaits impatiently the revelation of the children of God” (Rom 8:19), is redeemed. The creation awaits the revelation of the children of God also through art and in art. This is your task. Humanity in every age, and even today, looks to works of art to shed light upon its path and its destiny.
The Creator Spirit and artistic inspiration
15. Often in the Church there resounds the invocation to the Holy Spirit: Veni, Creator Spiritus... – “Come, O Creator Spirit, visit our minds, fill with your grace the hearts you have created”.(24)
The Holy Spirit, “the Breath” (ruah), is the One referred to already in the Book of Genesis: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters” (1:2). What affinity between the words “breath - breathing” and “inspiration”! The Spirit is the mysterious Artist of the universe. Looking to the Third Millennium, I would hope that all artists might receive in abundance the gift of that creative inspiration which is the starting-point of every true work of art.
Dear artists, you well know that there are many impulses which, either from within or from without, can inspire your talent. Every genuine inspiration, however, contains some tremor of that “breath” with which the Creator Spirit suffused the work of creation from the very beginning. Overseeing the mysterious laws governing the universe, the divine breath of the Creator Spirit reaches out to human genius and stirs its creative power. He touches it with a kind of inner illumination which brings together the sense of the good and the beautiful, and he awakens energies of mind and heart which enable it to conceive an idea and give it form in a work of art. It is right then to speak, even if only analogically, of “moments of grace”, because the human being is able to experience in some way the Absolute who is utterly beyond.
The “Beauty” that saves
16. On the threshold of the Third Millennium, my hope for all of you who are artists is that you will have an especially intense experience of creative inspiration. May the beauty which you pass on to generations still to come be such that it will stir them to wonder! Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person, and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate attitude.
From this wonder there can come that enthusiasm of which Norwid spoke in the poem to which I referred earlier. People of today and tomorrow need this enthusiasm if they are to meet and master the crucial challenges which stand before us. Thanks to this enthusiasm, humanity, every time it loses its way, will be able to lift itself up and set out again on the right path. In this sense it has been said with profound insight that “beauty will save the world”.(25)
Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savour life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!”.(26)
Artists of the world, may your many different paths all lead to that infinite Ocean of beauty where wonder becomes awe, exhilaration, unspeakable joy.
May you be guided and inspired by the mystery of the Risen Christ, whom the Church in these days contemplates with joy.
May the Blessed Virgin Mary be with you always: she is the “tota pulchra” portrayed by countless artists, whom Dante contemplates among the splendours of Paradise as “beauty that was joy in the eyes of all the other saints”.(27)
“From chaos there rises the world of the spirit”. These words of Adam Mickiewicz, written at a time of great hardship for his Polish homeland,(28) prompt my hope for you: may your art help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will transfigure matter, opening the human soul to the sense of the eternal.
With my heartfelt good wishes!
From the Vatican, 4 April 1999, Easter Sunday.
(1) Dialogus de Ludo Globi, lib. II: Philosophisch-Theologische Schriften, Vienna 1967, III, p. 332.
(2) The moral virtues, and among them prudence in particular, allow the subject to act in harmony with the criterion of moral good and evil: according to recta ratio agibilium (the right criterion of action). Art, however, is defined by philosophy as recta ratio factibilium (the right criterion of production).
(3) Promethidion, Bogumil, vv. 185-186: Pisma wybrane, Warsaw 1968, vol. 2, p. 216.
(4) The Greek translation of the Septuagint expresses this well in rendering the Hebrew term t(o-)b (good) as kalón (beautiful).
(5) Philebus, 65 A.
(6) JOHN PAUL II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio (14 September 1998), 80: AAS 91 (1999), 67.
(7) This pedagogical principle was given authoritative formulation by Saint Gregory the Great in a letter of 599 to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles: “Painting is employed in churches so that those who cannot read or write may at least read on the walls what they cannot decipher on the page”, Epistulae, IX, 209: CCL 140A, 1714.
(8) Lodi di Dio Altissimo, vv. 7 and 10: Fonti Francescane, No. 261, Padua 1982, p. 177.
(9) Legenda Maior, IX, 1: Fonti Francesane, No. 1162, loc. cit., p. 911.
(10) Enkomia of the Orthós of the Holy and Great Saturday.
(11) Homily I, 2: PG 34, 451.
(12) “At nobis ars una fides et musica Christus”: Carmen 20, 31: CCL 203, 144.
(13) Cf. JOHN PAUL II, Apostolic Letter Duodecimum Saeculum (4 December 1987), 8-9: AAS 80 (1988), pp. 247-249.
(14) La prospettiva rovesciata ed altri scritti, Rome 1984, p. 63.
(15) Paradiso XXV, 1-2.
(16) Cf. JOHN PAUL II, Homily at the Mass for the Conclusion of the Restoration of Michelangelo's Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, 8 April 1994: Insegnamenti, XVII, 1 (1994), 899-904.
(17) Cf. AAS 56 (1964), 438-444.
(18) No. 62.
(19) Message to Artists, 8 December 1965: AAS 58 (1966), 13.
(20) Cf. No. 122.
(21) SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 62.
(22) La teologia nel XII secolo, Milan 1992, p. 9.
(23) SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 22.
(24) Hymn at Vespers on Pentecost.
(25) F. DOSTOYEVSKY, The Idiot, Part III, chap. 5.
(26) Sero te amavi! Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi!: Confessions, 10, 27: CCL 27, 251.
(27) Paradiso XXXI, 134-135.
(28) Oda do mlodosci, v. 69: Wybór poezji, Wroclaw 1986, vol. 1, p. 63.

"The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty”
Card. Joseph Ratzinger
MESSAGE TO THE COMMUNION AND LIBERATION (CL) MEETING AT RIMINI (24-30 AUGUST 2002) 
Every year, in the Liturgy of the Hours for the Season of Lent, I am struck anew by a paradox in Vespers for Monday of the Second Week of the Psalter. Here, side by side, are two antiphons, one for the Season of Lent, the other for Holy Week. Both introduce Psalm 44 [45], but they present strikingly contradictory interpretations. The Psalm describes the wedding of the King, his beauty, his virtues, his mission, and then becomes an exaltation of his bride. In the Season of Lent, Psalm 44 is framed by the same antiphon used for the rest of the year. The third verse of the Psalm says: "You are the fairest of the children of men and grace is poured upon your lips". 
Naturally, the Church reads this psalm as a poetic-prophetic representation of Christ's spousal relationship with his Church. She recognizes Christ as the fairest of men, the grace poured upon his lips points to the inner beauty of his words, the glory of his proclamation. So it is not merely the external beauty of the Redeemer's appearance that is glorified: rather, the beauty of Truth appears in him, the beauty of God himself who draws us to himself and, at the same time captures us with the wound of Love, the holy passion (eros), that enables us to go forth together, with and in the Church his Bride, to meet the Love who calls us. 
On Monday of Holy Week, however, the Church changes the antiphon and invites us to interpret the Psalm in the light of Is 53,2: "He had neither beauty, no majesty, nothing to attract our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him". How can we reconcile this? The appearance of the "fairest of the children of men" is so wretched that no one desires to look at him. Pilate presented him to the crowd saying: "Behold the man!", to rouse sympathy for the crushed and battered Man, in whom no external beauty remained. 
Augustine, who in his youth wrote a book on the Beautiful and the Harmonious [De pulchro et apto] and who appreciated beauty in words, in music, in the figurative arts, had a keen appreciation of this paradox and realized that in this regard, the great Greek philosophy of the beautiful was not simply rejected but rather, dramatically called into question and what the beautiful might be, what beauty might mean, would have to be debated anew and suffered. Referring to the paradox contained in these texts, he spoke of the contrasting blasts of "two trumpets", produced by the same breath, the same Spirit. He knew that a paradox is contrast and not contradiction. Both quotes come from the same Spirit who inspires all Scripture, but sounds different notes in it. It is in this way that he sets us before the totality of true Beauty, of Truth itself. 
In the first place, the text of Isaiah supplies the question that interested the Fathers of the Church, whether or not Christ was beautiful. Implicit here is the more radical question of whether beauty is true or whether it is not ugliness that leads us to the deepest truth of reality. Whoever believes in God, in the God who manifested himself, precisely in the altered appearance of Christ crucified as love "to the end" (Jn 13,1), knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offence, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it. 
Certainly, the consciousness that beauty has something to do with pain was also present in the Greek world. For example, let us take Plato's Phaedrus. Plato contemplates the encounter with beauty as the salutary emotional shock that makes man leave his shell and sparks his "enthusiasm" by attracting him to what is other than himself. Man, says Plato, has lost the original perfection that was conceived for him. He is now perennially searching for the healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing impel him to pursue the quest; beauty prevents him from being content with just daily life. It causes him to suffer. In a Platonic sense, we could say that the arrow of nostalgia pierces man, wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts him upwards towards the transcendent. In his discourse in the Symposium, Aristophanes says that lovers do not know what they really want from each other. From the search for what is more than their pleasure, it is obvious that the souls of both are thirsting for something other than amorous pleasure. But the heart cannot express this "other" thing, "it has only a vague perception of what it truly wants and wonders about it as an enigma". 
In the 14th century, in the book, "The Life in Christ" by the Byzantine theologian, Nicholas Cabasilas, we rediscover Plato's experience in which the ultimate object of nostalgia, transformed by the new Christian experience, continues to be nameless. Cabasilas says: "When men have a longing so great that it surpasses human nature and eagerly desire and are able to accomplish things beyond human thought, it is the Bridegroom who has smitten them with this longing. It is he who has sent a ray of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound" (cf. The Life in Christ, the Second Book, 15). 
The beautiful wounds, but this is exactly how it summons man to his final destiny. What Plato said, and, more than 1,500 years later, Cabasilas, has nothing to do with superficial aestheticism and irrationalism or with the flight from clarity and the importance of reason. The beautiful is knowledge certainly, but, in a superior form, since it arouses man to the real greatness of the truth. Here Cabasilas has remained entirely Greek, since he puts knowledge first when he says, "In fact it is knowing that causes love and gives birth to it.... Since this knowledge is sometimes very ample and complete and at other times imperfect, it follows that the love potion has the same effect" (cf. ibid.). 
He is not content to leave this assertion in general terms. In his characteristically rigorous thought, he distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge through instruction which remains, so to speak, "second hand" and does not imply any direct contact with reality itself. The second type of knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge through personal experience, through a direct relationship with the reality. "Therefore we do not love it to the extent that it is a worthy object of love, and since we have not perceived the very form itself we do not experience its proper effect". 
True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man, moved by reality, "how it is Christ himself who is present and in an ineffable way disposes and forms the souls of men" (cf. ibid.). 
Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction. Of course we must not underrate the importance of theological reflection, of exact and precise theological thought; it remains absolutely necessary. But to move from here to disdain or to reject the impact produced by the response of the heart in the encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge would impoverish us and dry up our faith and our theology. We must rediscover this form of knowledge; it is a pressing need of our time. 
Starting with this concept, Hans Urs von Balthasar built his Opus magnum of Theological Aesthetics. Many of its details have passed into theological work, while his fundamental approach, in truth the essential element of the whole work, has not been so readily accepted. Of course, this is not just, or principally, a theological problem, but a problem of pastoral life, that has to foster the human person's encounter with the beauty of faith. All too often arguments fall on deaf ears because in our world too many contradictory arguments compete with one another, so much so that we are spontaneously reminded of the medieval theologians' description of reason, that it "has a wax nose': in other words, it can be pointed in any direction, if one is clever enough. Everything makes sense, is so convincing, whom should we trust? 
The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgement and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true". The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration. Isn't the same thing evident when we allow ourselves to be moved by the icon of the Trinity of Rublëv? In the art of the icons, as in the great Western paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic period, the experience described by Cabasilas, starting with interiority, is visibly portrayed and can be shared. 
In a rich way Pavel Evdokimov has brought to light the interior pathway that an icon establishes. An icon does not simply reproduce what can be perceived by the senses, but rather it presupposes, as he says, "a fasting of sight". Inner perception must free itself from the impression of the merely sensible, and in prayer and ascetical effort acquire a new and deeper capacity to see, to perform the passage from what is merely external to the profundity of reality, in such a way that the artist can see what the senses as such do not see, and what actually appears in what can be perceived: the splendour of the glory of God, the "glory of God shining on the face of Christ "(II Cor 4,6). 
To admire the icons and the great masterpieces of Christian art in general, leads us on an inner way, a way of overcoming ourselves; thus in this purification of vision that is a purification of the heart, it reveals the beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In this way we are brought into contact with the power of the truth. I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth against every denial, are the saints, and the beauty that the faith has generated. Today, for faith to grow, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the Beautiful. 
Now however, we still have to respond to an objection. We have already rejected the assumption which claims that what has just been said is a flight into the irrational, into mere aestheticism. 
Rather, it is the opposite that is true: this is the very way in which reason is freed from dullness and made ready to act. 
Today another objection has even greater weight: the message of beauty is thrown into complete doubt by the power of falsehood, seduction, violence and evil. Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn't reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true "reality" has at all times caused people anguish. At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry; after Auschwitz it is no longer possible to speak of a God who is good. People wondered: where was God when the gas chambers were operating? This objection, which seemed reasonable enough before Auschwitz when one realized all the atrocities of history, shows that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth and beauty. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was "the God" and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as "the truly divine" is absolutely no longer sufficient. 
In this way, we return to the "two trumpets" of the Bible with which we started, to the paradox of being able to say of Christ: "You are the fairest of the children of men", and: "He had no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him". In the Passion of Christ the Greek aesthetic that deserves admiration for its perceived contact with the Divine but which remained inexpressible for it, in Christ's passion is not removed but overcome. The experience of the beautiful has received new depth and new realism. The One who is the Beauty itself let himself be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns; the Shroud of Turin can help us imagine this in a realistic way. However, in his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes "to the very end"; for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence. Whoever has perceived this beauty knows that truth, and not falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world. It is not the false that is "true", but indeed, the Truth. It is, as it were, a new trick of what is false to present itself as "truth" and to say to us: over and above me there is basically nothing, stop seeking or even loving the truth; in doing so you are on the wrong track. The icon of the crucified Christ sets us free from this deception that is so widespread today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves be wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the beautiful. 
Falsehood however has another strategem. A beauty that is deceptive and false, a dazzling beauty that does not bring human beings out of themselves to open them to the ecstasy of rising to the heights, but indeed locks them entirely into themselves. Such beauty does not reawaken a longing for the Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self, but instead stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and pleasure. It is that type of experience of beauty of which Genesis speaks in the account of the Original Sin. Eve saw that the fruit of the tree was "beautiful" to eat and was "delightful to the eyes". The beautiful, as she experienced it, aroused in her a desire for possession, making her, as it were, turn in upon herself. Who would not recognize, for example, in advertising, the images made with supreme skill that are created to tempt the human being irresistibly, to make him want to grab everything and seek the passing satisfaction rather than be open to others. 
So it is that Christian art today is caught between two fires (as perhaps it always has been): it must oppose the cult of the ugly, which says that everything beautiful is a deception and only the representation of what is crude, low and vulgar is the truth, the true illumination of knowledge. Or it has to counter the deceptive beauty that makes the human being seem diminished instead of making him great, and for this reason is false. 
Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky's often quoted sentence: "The Beautiful will save us"? However, people usually forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming Beauty of Christ. We must learn to see Him. If we know Him, not only in words, but if we are struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him not only because we have heard others speak about him. Then we will have found the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems. Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through whom his own light becomes visible. 

Aristotle's theory of art and his analysis of the beautiful
William Turner

When Aristotle defines the purpose of art to be "the imitation of nature" he does not mean that the plastic arts and poetry should merely copy natural productions; his meaning is that as nature embodies the idea so also does art, but in a higher and more perfect form. Hence his famous saying that poetry is "more philosophical and elevated than history". Hence his equally famous doctrine that the aim of art is the calming, purifying (katharsis) and ennobling of the affections. For this reason, he prefers music to the plastic arts because it possesses a higher ethical value. 
Aristotle's conception of beauty is vague and undefined. At one time he enumerates order, symmetry, and limitation, at another time merely order and grandeur, as constituents of the beautiful. These latter qualities he finds especially in moral beauty. It is impossible here to give an estimate of Aristotle's philosophy as a whole or to trace its influence on subsequent philosophical systems. Suffice it to say that, taken as a system of knowledge, it is scientific rather than metaphysical; its starting-point is observation rather than intuition; and its aim, to find the ultimate cause of things rather than to determine the value (ethical or aesthetic) of things. Its influence extended, and still extends, beyond the realms of science and philosophy. Our thoughts, even on subjects far removed from science and philosophy, fall naturally into the Categories and formulas of Aristotelianism, and often find expression in terms which Aristotle invented, so that "the half-understood words of Aristotle have become laws of thought to other ages". 

Transcribed by Tomas Hancil 
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume I
Copyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. Knight
Nihil Obstat, March 1, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

SOURCE: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01713a.htm

On Goodness and Beauty
St Thomas Aquinas

Ad primum ergo dicendum quod pulchrum et bonum in subiecto quidem sunt idem, quia super eandem rem fundantur, scilicet super formam: et propter hoc, bonum laudatur ut pulchrum. Sed ratione differunt. Nam bonum proprie respicit appetitum: est enim bonum quod omnia appetunt. Et ideo habet rationem finis: nam appetitus est quasi quidam motus ad rem. Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam: pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent. Unde pulchrum in debita proportione consistit: quia sensus delectatur in rebus debite proportionatis, sicut in sibi similibus; nam et sensus ratio quaedam est, et omnis virtus cognoscitiva. Et quia cognitio fit per assimilationem, similitudo autem respicit formam, pulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causae formalis. 
"Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and consequently goodness is praised as beauty. But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire); and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing). On the other hand, beauty relates to the cognitive faculty; for beautiful things are those which please when seen. Hence beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind--because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every cognitive faculty. Now since knowledge is by assimilation, and similarity relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause." 
(Thomas Aquinas, STh I q5 a4 ad1)

Ad tertium dicendum quod pulchrum est idem bono, sola ratione differens. Cum enim bonum sit quod omnia appetunt, de ratione boni est quod in eo quietetur appetitus, sed ad rationem pulchri pertinet quod in eius aspectu seu cognitione quietetur appetitus. Unde et illi sensus praecipue respiciunt pulchrum, qui maxime cognoscitivi sunt, scilicet visus et auditus rationi deservientes, dicimus enim pulchra visibilia et pulchros sonos. In sensibilibus autem aliorum sensuum, non utimur nomine pulchritudinis, non enim dicimus pulchros sapores aut odores. Et sic patet quod pulchrum addit supra bonum, quendam ordinem ad vim cognoscitivam, ita quod bonum dicatur id quod simpliciter complacet appetitui; pulchrum autem dicatur id cuius ipsa apprehensio placet. 
"The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only. For since good is what all seek, the notion of good is that which calms the desire; while the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known. Consequently those senses chiefly regard the beautiful, which are the most cognitive, viz. sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the other objects of the other senses, we do not use the expression "beautiful," for we do not speak of beautiful tastes, and beautiful odors. Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend." 
(Thomas Aquinas, STh I-II q27 a1 ad3) 

On the Aesthetic Visio
St Thomas Aquinas

Ad tertium dicendum quod ... sensus sunt dati homini non solum ad vitae necessaria procuranda, sicut aliis animalibus; sed etiam ad cognoscendum. Unde, cum cetera animalia non delectentur in sensibilibus nisi per ordinem ad cibos et venerea, solus homo delectatur in ipsa pulchritudine sensibilium secundum seipsam. Et ideo, quia sensus praecipue vigent in facie, alia animalia habent faciem pronam ad terram, quasi ad cibum quaerendum et providendum sibi de victu, homo vero habet faciem erectam, ut per sensus, et praecipue per visum, qui est subtilior et plures differentias rerum ostendit, libere possit ex omni parte sensibilia cognoscere, et caelestia et terrena, ut ex omnibus intelligibilem colligat veritatem. 
"...the senses are given to man, not only for the purpose of procuring the necessaries of life, which they are bestowed on other animals, but also for the purpose of knowledge. Hence, whereas the other animals take delight in the objects of the senses only as ordered to food and sex, man alone takes pleasure in the beauty of sensible objects for its own sake. Therefore, as the senses are situated chiefly in the face, other animals have the face turned to the ground, as it were for the purpose of seeking food and procuring a livelihood; whereas man has his face erect, in order that by the senses, and chiefly by sight, which is more subtle and penetrates further into the differences of things, he may freely survey the sensible objects around him, both heavenly and earthly, so as to gather intelligible truth from all things." 
(Thomas Aquinas, STh I q91 a3 ad3) 

On the Formal Criteria of Beauty
St Thomas Aquinas

[A]d pulchritudinem tria requiruntur. 
Primo quidem, integritas sive perfectio, quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas, unde quae habent colorem nitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur. 
Quantum igitur ad primum, similitudinem habet cum proprio filii, inquantum est filius habens in se vere et perfecte naturam patris. Unde, ad hoc innuendum, Augustinus in sua expositione dicit, ubi, scilicet in filio, summa et prima vita est, et cetera. 
Quantum vero ad secundum, convenit cum proprio filii, inquantum est imago expressa patris. Unde videmus quod aliqua imago dicitur esse pulchra, si perfecte repraesentat rem, quamvis turpem. Et hoc tetigit Augustinus cum dicit, ubi est tanta convenientia, et prima aequalitas, et cetera. 
Quantum vero ad tertium, convenit cum proprio filii, inquantum est verbum, quod quidem lux est, et splendor intellectus, ut Damascenus dicit. Et hoc tangit Augustinus cum dicit, tanquam verbum perfectum cui non desit aliquid, et ars quaedam omnipotentis Dei, et cetera. Usus autem habet similitudinem cum propriis spiritus sancti, largo modo accipiendo usum, secundum quod uti comprehendit sub se etiam frui; prout uti est assumere aliquid in facultatem voluntatis, et frui est cum gaudio uti, ut Augustinus, X de Trin., dicit. Usus ergo quo pater et filius se invicem fruuntur, convenit cum proprio spiritus sancti, inquantum est amor. Et hoc est quod Augustinus dicit, illa dilectio, delectatio, felicitas vel beatitudo, usus ab illo appellatus est. Usus vero quo nos fruimur Deo, similitudinem habet cum proprio spiritus sancti, inquantum est donum. Et hoc ostendit Augustinus cum dicit, est in Trinitate spiritus sanctus, genitoris genitique suavitas, ingenti largitate atque ubertate nos perfundens. Et sic patet quare aeternitas, species et usus personis attribuantur vel approprientur, non autem essentia vel operatio. Quia in ratione horum, propter sui communitatem, non invenitur aliquid similitudinem habens cum propriis personarum. 
"For beauty includes three conditions, "integrity" or "perfection," since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due "proportion" or "harmony"; and lastly, "brightness" or "clarity," whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color. 
"The first of these has a likeness to the property of the Son, inasmuch as He as Son has in Himself truly and perfectly the nature of the Father. To insinuate this, Augustine says in his explanation (De Trin. vi, 10): "Where--that is, in the Son--there is supreme and primal life," etc. 
"The second agrees with the Son's property, inasmuch as He is the express Image of the Father. Hence we see that an image is said to be beautiful, if it perfectly represents even an ugly thing. This is indicated by Augustine when he says (De Trin. vi, 10), "Where there exists wondrous proportion and primal equality," etc. 
"The third agrees with the property of the Son, as the Word, which is the light and splendor of the intellect, as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 3). Augustine alludes to the same when he says (De Trin. vi, 10): "As the perfect Word, not wanting in anything, and, so to speak, the art of the omnipotent God," etc. 
""Use" has a likeness to the property of the Holy Ghost; provided the "use" be taken in a wide sense, as including also the sense of "to enjoy"; according as "to use" is to employ something at the beck of the will, and "to enjoy" means to use joyfully, as Augustine says (De Trin. x, 11). So "use," whereby the Father and the Son enjoy each other, agrees with the property of the Holy Ghost, as Love. This is what Augustine says (De Trin. vi, 10): "That love, that delectation, that felicity or beatitude, is called use by him" (Hilary). But the "use" by which we enjoy God, is likened to the property of the Holy Ghost as the Gift; and Augustine points to this when he says (De Trin. vi, 10): "In the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, the sweetness of the Begettor and the Begotten, pours out upon us mere creatures His immense bounty and wealth." Thus it is clear how "eternity," "species," and "use" are attributed or appropriated to the persons, but not essence or operation; because, being common, there is nothing in their concept to liken them to the properties of the Persons." 
(Thomas Aquinas, STh I q39 a8) 

On Nature vs Art
St Thomas Aquinas

Ars autem deficit ab operatione naturae; quia natura dat formam substantialem, quod ars facere non potest; sed omnes formae artificiales sunt accidentales. 
Art is deficient when compared with the operations of nature. For nature bestows substantial form, which art cannot do. Rather, all artificial forms are accidental.
(Thomas Aquinas, STh III q2 a1)

Art and Beauty
Jacques Maritain
Chapter 5 of Art and Scolasticism

Saint Thomas, who was as simple as he was wise, defined the beautiful as that which, being seen, pleases: id quod visum placet.[47] These four words say all that is necessary: a vision, that is to say, an intuitive knowledge, and a delight. The beautiful is what gives delight -- not just any delight, but delight in knowing; not the delight peculiar to the act of knowing, but a delight which superabounds and overflows from this act because of the object known. If a thing exalts and delights the soul by the very fact that it is given to the soul's intuition, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful.[48] 
Beauty is essentially an object of intelligence, for that which knows in the full sense of the word is intelligence, which alone is open to the infinity of being. The natural place of beauty is the intelligible world, it is from there that it descends. But it also, in a way, falls under the grasp of the senses, in so far as in man they serve the intellect and can themselves take delight in knowing: "Among all the senses, it is to the sense of sight and the sense of hearing only that the beautiful relates, because these two senses are maxime cognoscitivi."[49] The part played by the senses in the perception of beauty is even rendered enormous in us, and well-nigh indispensable, by the very fact that our intelligence is not intuitive, as is the intelligence of the angel; it sees, to be sure, but on condition of abstracting and discoursing; only sense knowledge possesses perfectly in man the intuitiveness required for the perception of the beautiful. Thus man can doubtless enjoy purely intelligible beauty, but the beautiful that is connatural to man is the beautiful that delights the intellect through the senses and through their intuition. Such is also the beautiful that is proper to our art, which shapes a sensible matter in order to delight the spirit. It would thus like to believe that paradise is not lost. It has the savor of the terrestrial paradise, because it restores, for a moment, the peace and the simultaneous delight of the intellect and the senses. 
If beauty delights the intellect, it is because it is essentially a certain excellence or perfection in the proportion of things to the intellect. Hence the three conditions Saint Thomas assigned to beauty:[50] integrity, because the intellect is pleased in fullness of Being; proportion, because the intellect is pleased in order and unity; finally, and above all, radiance or clarity, because the intellect is pleased in light and intelligibility. A certain splendor is, in fact, according to all the ancients, the essential characteristic of beauty -- claritas est de ratione pulchritudinis,[51] lux pulchrificat, quia sine luce omnia sunt turpia[52] -- but it is a splendor of intelligibility: splendor veri, said the Platonists; splendor ordinis, said Saint Augustine, adding that "unity is the form of all beauty";[53] splendor formae, said Saint Thomas in his precise metaphysician's language: for the form, that is to say, the principle which constitutes the proper perfection of all that is, which constitutes and achieves things in their essences and qualities, which is, finally, if one may so put it, the ontological secret that they bear within them, their spiritual being, their operating mystery -- the form, indeed, is above all the proper principle of intelligibility, the proper clarity of every thing. Besides, every form is a vestige or a ray of the creative Intelligence imprinted at the heart of created being. On the other hand, every order and every proportion is the work of intelligence. And so, to say with the Schoolmen that beauty is the splendor of the form on the proportioned parts of matter,[54] is to say that it is a flashing of intelligence on a matter intelligibly arranged. The intelligence delights in the beautiful because in the beautiful it finds itself again and recognizes itself, and makes contact with its own light. This is so true that those -- such as Saint Francis of Assisi -- perceive and savor more the beauty of things, who know that things come forth from an intelligence, and who relate them to their author. 
Every sensible beauty implies, it is true, a certain delight of the eye itself or of the ear or the imagination: but there is beauty only if the intelligence also takes delight in some way. A beautiful color "washes the eye," just as a strong scent dilates the nostril; but of these two "forms" or qualities color only is said to be beautiful, because, being received, unlike the perfume, in a sense power capable of disinterested knowledge,[55] it can be, even through its purely sensible brilliance, an object of delight for the intellect. Moreover, the higher the level of man's culture, the more spiritual becomes the brilliance of the form that delights him. 
It is important, however, to note that in the beautiful that we have called connatural to man, and which is proper to human art, this brilliance of the form, no matter how purely intelligible it may be in itself, is seized in the sensible and through the sensible, and not separately from it. The intuition of artistic beauty thus stands at the opposite extreme from the abstraction of scientific truth. For with the former it is through the very apprehension of the sense that the light of being penetrates the intelligence. 
The intelligence in this case, diverted from all effort of abstraction, rejoices without work and without discourse. It is dispensed from its usual labor; it does not have to disengage an intelligible from the matter in which it is buried, in order to go over its different attributes step by step; like a stag at the gushing spring, intelligence has nothing to do but drink; it drinks the clarity of being. Caught up in the intuition of sense, it is irradiated by an intelligible fight that is suddenly given to it, in the very sensible in which it glitters, and which it does not seize sub ratione veri, but rather sub ratione delectabilis, through the happy release procured for the intelligence and through the delight ensuing in the appetite, which leaps at every good of the soul as at its proper object. Only afterwards will it be able to reflect more or less successfully upon the causes of this delight.[56] 
Thus, although the beautiful borders on the metaphysical true, in the sense that every splendor of intelligibility in things implies some conformity with the Intelligence that is the cause of things, nevertheless the beautiful is not a kind of truth, but a kind of good;[57] the perception of the beautiful relates to knowledge, but by way of addition, comme à la jeunesse s'ajoute sa fleur; it is not so much a kind of knowledge as a kind of delight. 
The beautiful is essentially delightful. This is why, of its very nature and precisely as beautiful, it stirs desire and produces love, whereas the true as such only illumines. "Omnibus igitur est pulchrum et bonum desiderabile et amabile et diligibile."[58] It is for its beauty that Wisdom is loved.[59] And it is for itself that every beauty is first loved, even if afterwards the too weak flesh is caught in the trap. Love in its turn produces ecstasy, that is to say, it puts the lover outside of himself; ecstasy, of which the soul experiences a diminished form when it is seized by the beauty of the work of art, and the fullness when it is absorbed, like the dew, by the beauty of God. 
And of God Himself, according to Denis the Areopagite,[60] we must be so bold as to say that He suffers in some way ecstasy of love, because of the abundance of His goodness which leads Him to diffuse in all things a participation of His splendor. But God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, whereas our love is caused by the beauty of what we love. 
*
Integrity or perfection or completion can be realized. The lack of a head or an arm is quite a considerable lack of integrity in a woman but of very little account in a statue -- whatever disappointment M. Ravaisson may have felt at not being able to complete the Venus de Milo. The least sketch of da Vinci's or even of Rodin's is more complete than the most perfect Bouguereau. And if it pleases a futurist to give the lady he is painting only one eye, or a quarter of an eye, no one denies him the right to do this: one asks only -- here is the whole problem -- that this quarter of an eye be precisely all the eye this lady needs in the given case. 
It is the same with proportion, fitness and harmony. They are diversified according to the objects and according to the ends. The good proportion of a man is not the good proportion of a child. Figures constructed according to the Greek or the Egyptian canons are perfectly proportioned in their genre; but Rouault's clowns are also perfectly proportioned, in their genre. Integrity and proportion have no absolute signification,[61] and must be understood solely in relation to the end of the work, which is to make a form shine on matter. 
Finally, and above all, this radiance itself of the form, which is the main thing in beauty, has an infinity of diverse ways of shining on matter.[*d] There is the sensible radiance of color or tone; there is the intelligible clarity of an arabesque, of a rhythm or an harmonious balance, of an activity or a movement; there is the reflection upon things of a human or divine thought;[62] there is, above all, the deep-seated splendor one glimpses of the soul, of the soul principle of life and animal energy, or principle of spiritual life, of pain and passion. And there is a still more exalted splendor, the splendor of Grace, which the Greeks did not know. 
Beauty, therefore, is not conformity to a certain ideal and immutable type, in the sense in which they understand it who, confusing the true and the beautiful, knowledge and delight, would have it that in order to perceive beauty man discover "by the vision of ideas," "through the material envelope," "the invisible essence of things" and their "necessary type."[63] Saint Thomas was as far removed from this pseudo-Platonism as he was from the idealist bazaar of Winckelmann and David. There is beauty for him the moment the shining of any form on a suitably proportioned matter succeeds in pleasing the intellect, and he takes care to warn us that beauty is in some way relative-relative not to the dispositions of the subject, in the sense in which the moderns understand the word relative, but to the proper nature and end of the thing, and to the formal conditions under which it is taken. "Pulchritudo quodammodo dicitur per respectum ad aliquid. . . ."[64] "Alia enim est pulchritude spiritus et alia corporis, atque alia huius et illius corporis."[65] And however beautiful a created thing may be, it can appear beautiful to some and not to others, because it is beautiful only under certain aspects, which some discern and others do not: it is thus "beautiful in one place and not beautiful in another." 
*
If this is so, it is because the beautiful belongs to the order of the transcendentals, that is to say, objects of thought which transcend every limit of genus or category, and which do not allow themselves to be enclosed in any class, because they imbue everything and are to be found everywhere.[66] Like the one, the true and the good, the beautiful is being itself considered from a certain aspect; it is a property of being. It is not an accident superadded to being, it adds to being only a relation of reason: it is being considered as delighting, by the mere intuition of it, an intellectual nature. Thus everything is beautiful, just as everything is good, at least in a certain relation. And as being is everywhere present and everywhere varied the beautiful likewise is diffused everywhere and is everywhere varied. Like being and the other transcendentals, it is essentially analogous, that is to say, it is predicated for diverse reasons, sub diversa ratione, of the diverse subjects of which it is predicated: each kind of being is in its own way, is good in its own way, is beautiful in its own way. 
Analogous concepts are predicated of God pre-eminently; in Him the perfection they designate exists in a "formal-eminent" manner, in the pure and infinite state. God is their "sovereign analogue,"[67] and they are to be met with again in things only as a dispersed and prismatized reflection of the countenance of God.[68] Thus Beauty is one of the divine names. 
God is beautiful. He is the most beautiful of beings, because, as Denis the Areopagite and Saint Thomas explain,[69] His beauty is without alteration or vicissitude, without increase or diminution; and because it is not as the beauty of things, all of which have a particularized beauty, particulatam pulchritudinem, sicut et particulatam naturam. He is beautiful through Himself and in Himself, beautiful absolutely. 
He is beautiful to the extreme (superpulcher), because in the perfectly simple unity of His nature there pre-exists in a super- excellent manner the fountain of all beauty. 
He is beauty itself, because He gives beauty to all created beings, according to the particular nature of each, and because He is the cause of all consonance and all brightness. Every form indeed, that is to say, every light, is "a certain irradiation proceeding from the first brightness," "a participation in the divine brightness." And every consonance or every harmony, every concord, every friendship and every union whatsoever among beings proceeds from the divine beauty, the primordial and super-eminent type of all consonance, which gathers all things together and which calls them all to itself, meriting well in this "the name chalos, which derives from 'to call.'" Thus "the beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similitude of divine beauty participated in by things," and, on the other hand, as every form is a principle of being and as every consonance or every harmony is preservative of being, it must be said that divine beauty is the cause of the being of all that is. Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur.[70] 
In the Trinity, Saint Thomas adds,[71] the name Beauty is attributed most fittingly to the Son. As for integrity or perfection, He has truly and perfectly in Himself, without the least diminution, the nature of the Father. As for due proportion or consonance, He is the express and perfect image of the Father: and it is proportion which befits the image as such. As for radiance, finally, He is the Word, the light and the splendor of the intellect, "perfect Word to Whom nothing is lacking, and, so to speak, art of Almighty God."[72] 
Beauty, therefore, belongs to the transcendental and metaphysical order. This is why it tends of itself to draw the soul beyond the created. Speaking of the instinct for beauty, Baudelaire, the poète maudit to whom modern art owes its renewed awareness of the theological quality and tyrannical spirituality of beauty, writes: ". . . it is this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its various spectacles as a sketch of, as a correspondence with, Heaven. . . . It is at once through poetry and across poetry, through and across music, that the soul glimpses the splendors situated beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, these tears are not proof of an excess of joy, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, a demand of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect and desiring to take possession immediately, even on this earth, of a revealed paradise."[73] 
*
The moment one touches a transcendental, one touches being itself, a likeness of God, an absolute, that which ennobles and delights our life; one enters into the domain of the spirit. It is remarkable that men really communicate with one another only by passing through being or one of its properties. Only in this way do they escape from the individuality in which matter encloses them. If they remain in the world of their sense needs and of their sentimental egos, in vain do they tell their stories to one another, they do not understand each other. They observe each other without seeing each other, each one of them infinitely alone, even though work or sense pleasures bind them together. But let one touch the good and Love, like the saints, the true, like an Aristotle, the beautiful, like a Dante or a Bach or a Giotto, then contact is made, souls communicate. Men are really united only by the spirit; light alone brings them together, intellectualia et rationalia omnia congregans, et indestructibilia faciens.[74] 
Art in general tends to make a work. But certain arts tend to make a beautiful work, and in this they differ essentially from all the others. The work to which all the other arts tend is itself ordered to the service of man, and is therefore a simple means; and it is entirely enclosed in a determined material genus. The work to which the fine arts tend is ordered to beauty; as beautiful, it is an end, an absolute, it suffices of itself; and if, as work-to-be-made, it is material and enclosed in a genus, as beautiful it belongs to the kingdom of the spirit and plunges deep into the transcendence and the infinity of being. 
The fine arts thus stand out in the genus art as man stands out in the genus animal. And like man himself they are like a horizon where matter and spirit meet. They have a spiritual soul. Hence they possess many distinctive properties. Their contact with the beautiful modifies in them certain characteristics of art in general, notably, as I shall try to show, with respect to the rules of art; on the other hand, this contact discloses and carries to a sort of excess other generic characteristics of the virtue of art, above all its intellectual character and its resemblance to the speculative virtues. 
There is a curious analogy between the fine arts and wisdom. Like wisdom, they are ordered to an object which transcends man and which is of value in itself, and whose amplitude is limitless, for beauty, like being, is infinite. They are disinterested, desired for themselves, truly noble because their work taken in itself is not made in order that one may use it as a means, but in order that one may enjoy it as an end, being a true fruit, aliquid ultimum et delectabile. Their whole value is spiritual, and their mode of being is contemplative. For if contemplation is not their act, as it is the act of wisdom, nevertheless they aim at producing an intellectual delight, that is to say, a kind of contemplation; and they also presuppose in the artist a kind of contemplation, from which the beauty of the work must overflow. That is why we may apply to them, with due allowance, what Saint Thomas says of wisdom when he compares it to play:[75] "The contemplation of wisdom is rightly compared to play, because of two things that one finds in play. The first is that play is delightful, and the contemplation of wisdom has the greatest delight, according to what Wisdom says of itself in Ecclesiasticus: my spirit is sweet above honey. The second is that the movements of play are not ordered to anything else, but are sought for themselves. And it is the same with the delights of wisdom. . . . That is why divine Wisdom compares its delight to play: I was delighted every day, playing before him in the world.[76]" 
But Art remains, nevertheless, in the order of Making, and it is by drudgery upon some matter that it aims at delighting the spirit. Hence for the artist a strange and saddening condition, image itself of man's condition in the world, where he must wear himself out among bodies and live with the spirits. Though reproaching the old poets for holding Divinity to be jealous, Aristotle acknowledges that they were right in saying that the possession of wisdom is in the strict sense reserved to Divinity alone: "It is not a human possession, for human nature is a slave in so many ways."[77] To produce beauty likewise belongs to God alone in the strict sense. And if the condition of the artist is more human and less exalted than that of the wise man, it is also more discordant and more painful, because his activity does not remain wholly within the pure immanence of spiritual operations, and does not in itself consist in contemplating, but in making. Without enjoying the substance and the peace of wisdom, he is caught up in the hard exigencies of the intellect and the speculative life, and he is condemned to all the servile miseries of practice and of temporal production. 
*
"Dear Brother Leo, God's little beast, even if a Friar Minor spoke the language of the angels and raised to life a man dead for four days, note it well that it is not therein that perfect joy is found. . . ." 
Even if the artist were to encompass in his work all the light of heaven and all the grace of the first garden, he would not have perfect joy, because he is following wisdom's footsteps and running by the scent of its perfumes, but does not possess it. Even if the philosopher were to know all the intelligible reasons and all the properties of being, he would not have perfect joy, because his wisdom is human. Even if the theologian were to know all the analogies of the divine processions and all the whys and the wherefores of Christ's actions, he would not have perfect joy, because his wisdom has a divine origin but a human mode, and a human voice. 
Ah! les voix, mourez donc, mourantes que vous êtes! 
The Poor and the Peaceful alone have perfect joy because they possess wisdom and contemplation par excellence, in the silence of creatures and in the voice of Love; united without intermediary to subsisting Truth, they know "the sweetness that God gives and the delicious taste of the Holy Spirit."[78] This is what prompted Saint Thomas, a short time before his death, to say of his unfinished Summa: "It seems to me as so much straw" - - mihi videtur ut palea. Human straw: the Parthenon and Notre- Dame de Chartres, the Sistine Chapel and the Mass in D -- and which will be burned on the last day! "Creatures have no savor."[*e] 
The Middle Ages knew this order. The Renaissance shattered it. After three centuries of infidelity, prodigal Art aspired to become the ultimate end of man, his Bread and his Wine, the consubstantial mirror of beatific Beauty. And the poet hungry for beatitude who asked of art the mystical fullness that God alone can give, has been able to open out only onto Sigê l'abîme. Rimbaud's silence marks perhaps the end of a secular apostasy. In any case it clearly signifies that it is folly to seek in art the words of eternal life and the repose of the human heart; and that the artist, if he is not to shatter his art or his soul, must simply be, as artist, what art wants him to be -- a good workman. 
And now the modern world, which had promised the artist everything, soon will scarcely leave him even the bare means of subsistence. Founded on the two unnatural principles of the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful, multiplying needs and servitude without the possibility of there ever being a limit, destroying the leisure of the soul, withdrawing the material factibile from the control which proportioned it to the ends of the human being, and imposing on man the panting of the machine and the accelerated movement of matter, the system of nothing but the earth is imprinting on human activity a truly inhuman mode and a diabolical direction, for the final end of all this frenzy is to prevent man from resembling God, 
dum nit perenne cogitat, seseque culpis illigat. 
Consequently he must, if he is to be logical, treat as useless, and therefore as rejected, all that by any grounds bears the mark of the spirit. 
Or it will even be necessary that heroism, truth, virtue, beauty become useful values -- the best, the most loyal instruments of propaganda and of control of temporal powers. 
Persecuted like the wise man and almost like the saint, the artist will perhaps recognize his brothers at last and discover his true vocation again: for in a way he is not of this world, being, from the moment that he works for beauty, on the path which leads upright souls to God and manifests to them the invisible things by the visible. However rare may be at such a time those who will not want to please the Beast and to turn with the wind, it is in them, by the very fact that they will exercise a disinterested activity, that the human race will live.

[*d] By "radiance of the form" must be understood an ontological splendor which is in one way or another revealed to our mind, not a conceptual clarity. We must avoid all misunderstanding here: the words clarity, intelligibility, light, which we use to characterize the role of "form" at the heart of things, do not necessarily designate something clear and intelligible for us, but rather something clear and luminous in itself, intelligible in itself, and which often remains obscure to our eyes, either because of the matter in which the form in question is buried, or because of the transcendence of the form itself in the things of the spirit. The more substantial and the more pro-found this secret sense is, the more hidden it is for us; so that, in truth, to say with the Schoolmen that the form is in things the proper principle of intelligibility, is to say at the same time that it is the proper principle of mystery. (There is in fact no mystery where there is nothing to know: mystery exists where there is more to be known than is given to our comprehension.) To define the beautiful by the radiance of the form is in reality to define it by the radiance of a mystery. 
It is a Cartesian misconception to reduce clarity in itself to clarity for us. In art this misconception produces academicism, and condemns us to a beauty so meagre that it can radiate in the soul only the most paltry of delights. 
If it be a question of the "legibility" of the work, I would add that if the radiance of form can appear in an "obscure" work as well as in a "clear" work, the radiance of mystery can appear in a "clear" work as well as in an "obscure" work. From this point of view neither "obscurity" nor "clarity" enjoys any privilege. [1927] 
Moreover, it is natural that every really new work appear obscure at first. Time will decant the judgment. "They say," Hopkins wrote to Bridges apropos the poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, "that vessels sailing from the port of London will take (perhaps it should be / used once to take) Thames water for the voyage: it was foul and stunk at first as the ship worked but by degrees casting its filth was in a few days very pure and sweet and wholesome and better than any water in the world. However that may be, it is true to my purpose. When a new thing, such as my ventures in the Deutschland are, is presented us our first criticisms are not our truest, best, most homefelt, or most lasting but what come easiest on the instant. They are barbarous and like what the ignorant and the ruck say. This was so with you. The Deutschland on her first run worked very much and unsettled you, thickening and clouding your mind with vulgar mud-bottom and common sewage (I see that I am going it with the image) and just then you drew off your criticisms all stinking (a necessity now of the image) and bilgy, whereas if you had let your thoughts cast themselves they would have been clearer in themselves and more to my taste too." Letter of May 13, 1878, in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, edited with notes and an introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935),pp.50-51. 
[*e] I feel today that I must apologize for the sort of thoughtlessness with which I adopted this phrase here. One must have little experience of created things, or much experience of divine things, in order to be able to speak in this way. In general, formulas of contempt with regard to created things belong to a conventional literature that is difficult to endure. The creature is deserving of compassion, not contempt; it exists only because it is loved. It is deceptive because it has too much savor, and because this savor is nothing in comparison with the being of God. [1935]
47. Summa theol., I, 5, 4, ad 1. Saint Thomas, it must be added, means to give here only a definition per effectum. It is when he assigns the three elements of the beautiful that he gives an essential definition of it. 
48. "It is of the nature of the beautiful that by the sight or knowledge of it the appetite is allayed." Summa theol., I-II, 27, 1, ad 3. 
49. Ibid. 
50. Summa theol., I, 39, 8. "For beauty includes three conditions: integrityor perfection, since those things which are impaired are by that very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony; and lastly, brightness or clarity, whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color." (English translation from Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis. New York:Random House, 1945.) 
51. Saint Thomas, Comment. in lib. de Divin. Nomin., lect. 6. 
52. Saint Thomas, Comment. in Psalm., Ps. XXV, 5. 
53. De vera Religione, cap. 41. 
54. Opusc. de Pulchro et Bono, attributed to Albert the Great and sometimes to Saint Thomas. Plotinus (Enneads, I, 6), speaking of beauty in bodies, describes it as "something which affects one sensibly from the first impression, which the soul perceives with agreement, recognizes and welcomes, and to which it in some way accommodates itself." He goes on to say that "every thing without form and made to receive a form morphê and an intelligible imprint eidos is ugly and outside the divine reason, so long as it does not share in such an imprint and spiritual quality amoiron on logou kai eidous." And let us also retain, from this very important chapter on beauty, the remark that "the beauty of color is a simple quality which comes to it from a form dominating the obscure in matter, and from the presence of an incorporeal light which is reason and idea logou kai eidous ontos." 
55. Sight and hearing SERVING REASON. (Summa theol., I-II, 27, 1, ad 3). -- Moreover sense itself delights in things suitably proportioned only because it is itself measure and proportion, and so finds in them a likeness of its nature: "Sense delights in things duly proportioned, as in what are like it, for sense too is a kind of reason, as is every cognitive power." Summa theol., I, 5, 4, ad 1. On the expression "a kind of reason" -- ratio quaedam he d' aisthêsis ho logos -- cf. Comm. in de Anima, lib. 3, lect. 2. 
It is permissible to conjecture that in glorified bodies all the senses, intellectualized, may be of use in the perception of the beautiful. Already poets are teaching us to anticipate in a way this state. Baudelaire has annexed to aesthetics the sense of smell. 
56. This question of the perception of the beautiful by the intellect using the senses as instruments would deserve a careful analysis which, in my opinion, has too rarely tempted the subtlety of philosophers. Kant gave it his attention in the Critique of Judgment. Unfortunately the direct, interesting, and sometimes profound observations much more frequently met with in this Critique than in the other two are vitiated by his mania for system and symmetry, and above all by the fundamental errors and the subjectivism of his theory of knowledge. 
One definition he gives of the beautiful calls for an attentive examination. "The beautiful," says Kant, "is what gives pleasure universally without a concept." [*n] Taken as such, this definition runs the risk of causing us to forget the essential relation which beauty has to the intellect. Thus it was that in Schopenhauer and his disciples it blossomed into an anti-intellectualist divinization of Music. Nevertheless, it evokes in its way the much more exact expression of Saint Thomas, id quod visum placet, that which, being seen, pleases -- that is to say, being the object of an intuition. By virtue of this last definition, the perception of the beautiful is not, as the Leibniz-Wolff school would have it, a confused conception of the perfection of the thing or of its conformity with an ideal type. (Cf. Critique of Judgment, "Analysis of the Beautiful," ^ XV.) 
If, owing to the nature of the intellect, it is normal that the perception of the beautiful be accompanied by the presence or the outline of a concept, however confused, and that it suggest ideas,[*o] nevertheless, this is not what formally constitutes it: the splendor or radiance of the form glittering in the beautiful object is not presented to the mind by a concept or an idea, but rather by the sensible object intuitively grasped -- in which there is transmitted, as through an instrumental cause, this radiance of a form. Thus one may say -- at least this seems to me the only possible way to interpret Saint Thomas' words -- that in the perception of the beautiful the intellect is, through the means of the sensible intuition itself, placed in the presence of a radiant intelligibility (derived, like every intelligibility, in the last analysis from the first intelligibility of the divine Ideas), which insofar as it produces the joy of the beautiful cannot be disengaged or separated from its sense matrix and consequently does not procure an intellectual knowledge expressible in a concept. Contemplating the object in the intuition which sense has of it, the intellect enjoys a presence, the radiant presence of an intelligible which does not reveal itself to its eyes such as it is. If it turns away from sense to abstract and reason, it turns away from its joy and loses contact with this radiance. 
To understand this, let us recall that it is intellect and sense as forming but one, or, if one may so speak, intelligentiated sense, which gives rise in the heart to aesthetic joy. 
It is thereby clear that the intellect does not -- except after the event and reflexively -- think of abstracting from the sensible singular in the contemplation of which it is fixed the intelligible reasons of its joy. And it is also clear that the beautiful can be a marvellous tonic for the intellect, and yet does not develop its power of abstraction and reasoning; and that the perception of the beautiful is accompanied by that curious feeling of intellectual fullness through which we seem to be swollen with a superior knowledge of the object contemplated, and which nevertheless leaves us powerless to express it and to possess it by our ideas and make it the object of scientific analysis. Thus music gives us enjoyment of being, more so perhaps than the other arts; but it does not give us knowledge of being, and it is absurd to make it a substitute for metaphysics. Thus artistic contemplation affects the heart with a joy that is above all intellectual, and it must even be affirmed with Aristotle (Poetics, IX, 3, 1451 b 6) that "poetry" is something more philosophical and of greater import than history, because poetry is concerned more with the universal and history is concerned only with the singular"; and yet the apprehension of the universal or the intelligible takes place in poetry without discourse and without any effort of abstraction.[*p] 
This seizure of an intelligible reality immediately "sensible to the heart," without resorting to the concept as formal means, creates, on an entirely different plane and by an entirely different psychological process, a distant analogy between aesthetic emotion and the mystical graces. [I say "by an entirely different psychological process." In reality, mystical contemplation takes place by virtue of the connaturality of love; here, on the contrary, love and affective connaturality with regard to the beautiful thing are a consequence or a proper effect of the perception or aesthetic emotion -- a proper effect, moreover, which normally reverberates back on this emotion itself to intensify it, to give it content, to enrich it in a thousand ways. In his interesting essay on Poetic Experience (London: Sheed and Ward, 1934), Father Thomas Gilby has not, in my opinion, sufficiently stressed this difference. Cf. later on, n. 138.] 
I would add that if the very act of the perception of the beautiful takes place without discourse and without any effort of abstraction, conceptual discourse can nevertheless play an immense part in the preparation for this act. Indeed, like the virtue of art itself, taste, or the aptitude for perceiving beauty and pronouncing a judgment on it, presupposes an innate gift, but can be developed by education and instruction, especially by the study and rational explication of works of art. All other things being equal, the better informed the mind is of the rules, the methods and the difficulties of art, and above all of the end pursued by the artist and his intentions, the better it is preparedto receive into it, by means of the sense's intuition, the intelligible splendor emanating from the work, and thus to perceive spontaneously, to relish, its beauty. So it is that the artist's friends, who know what the artist sought to accomplish -- as the Angels know the Ideas of the Creator -- derive far greater enjoyment from his works than the public; so it is that the beauty of certain works is a hidden beauty, accessible only to a small number. 
The eye and the ear are said to accustom themselves to new relations. It is rather the intellect which accepts them, as soon as it has realized to what end and to what kind of beauty they are ordered, and so prepares itself to enjoy better the work which involves them. 
We therefore see the role concepts play in the perception of the beautiful: a dispositive and material role. I have said that this perception is normally accompanied by the presence or the outline of a concept, however confused it may be. In the simplest case, the border-line case, it might be simply the very concept of "beautiful," for the intellect, being capable of a return on itself because of its spirituality, knows (at least confusedly and in lived act) that it is experiencing delight when it is. In fact there is often a whole host of conceptual outlines which the mind is stimulated to produce by the fact of its being put into play, and which secretly accompany its intuitive delight. After the first shock when the tongue can find nothing to say, these will be able to spill out in exclamations: "What strength! Such solidity!" etc. Contrariwise at times a single word, a concept deposited in the mind ("You think he's a great painter? Taste is his strongest point") will be sufficient to spoil in advance and inhibit the delight one would have felt in the presence of a work. But, in all this, the role of the concepts does not go beyond the sphere of dispositive causality. 
It may be further observed that Kant is right in considering emotion in the ordinary sense of the word ("the excitement of vital energies") as a posterior and ensuing fact in the perception of the beautiful. (Ibid., ^IX.) But for him the primary and essential fact is the "aesthetic judgment" (although on this point his texts seem to conflict at times); for us it is the intuitive delight of the intellect and (secondarily) of the senses: or, to put it in a less summary and more exact manner -- for delight is essentially an act of the appetitive faculty (it is of the nature of the beautiful that by the sight or knowledge of it the appetite is allayed) -- it is the quieting of our faculty of Desire which finds repose in the proper good of the cognitive faculty perfectly and harmoniously released by the intuition of the beautiful. (Cf. Summa theol., I-II, 11, 1, ad 2. The end and perfection of every other faculty is contained under the object of the appetitive faculty, as the proper is enveloped in the common.) The beautiful goes straight to the heart, it is a ray of intelligibility which reaches it directly and sometimes brings tears to the eyes. And doubtless this delight is an "emotion," a "feeling" (gaudium in the "intellective appetite" or will, joy properly so called, in which "we communicate with the angels," ibid., 31, 4, ad 3). However it is a question here of an altogether special feeling, one which depends simply on knowledge and on the happy fullness which a sensible intuition procures for the intellect. It is a superior emotion, whose essential nucleus is spiritual in nature, although in actual fact, like every emotion in us, it sets in motion the whole domain of affectivity. Emotion in the ordinary sense of the word, biological emotion, the development of passions and feelings other than this intellectual joy, is but an effect -- an absolutely normal effect -- of this joy; it is posterior, if not in time, at least in the nature of things, to the perception of the beautiful, and it remains extrinsic to what formally constitutes the latter. 
It is interesting to observe that the subjectivist "venom"[*q] which has infected metaphysics in the wake of the Kantian revolution has almost inevitably compelled philosophers to seek the essence of aesthetic perception -- in spite of Kant himself -- in emotion (in the ordinary sense of the word). One expression of this subjectivism is Lipps' and Volkelt's ingenious but arbitrary theory of Einfühlung, which reduces the perception of the beautiful to a projection or infusion of our emotions and feelings into the object. (Cf. M. de Wulf, "L'Oeuvre d'art et la beauté," Annales de l'Institut de philosophie de Louvain, vol. IV, 1920, pp. 421 et seq.) 
57. "Beauty is a certain kind of good." Cajetan, In I-II, 27, 1. -- So it was that the Greeks used the same word kalokagathia to express both notions. 
The beautiful, we have seen, directly relates to the faculty of knowing. For by definition it must procure a certain intuitive delight of the intellect (and, in our case, of the senses). But if the happy release of a faculty, of the intellect for instance, brings about the metaphysical well-being and, as it were, blossoming of this faculty, thus satisfying the natural appetite which is one with its essence, nevertheless this bloom of the act is properly pleasure, joy or delight, only because it is immediately seized by the subject's appetitive faculty itself, the appetitus elicitus, which finds therein its goal and its repose.[*r] For, according to the text of Saint Thomas recalled in the preceding note, "the end and perfection of every other faculty is contained under the object of the appetitive faculty, as the proper is enveloped in the common" (Summa theol., I-II, 11, 1, ad 2). The beautiful therefore is in an essential and necessary, albeit indirect, relation to the appetite. For this reason it is "a kind of good" and must be considered, as I say in the text, as "essentially delightful." It is the nature of beauty to gratify desire in the intellect, the faculty of enjoyment in the faculty of knowing. 
The texts of Saint Thomas on this point of doctrine need to be carefully construed. He first wrote in the Commentary on the Sentences: "Beauty has not the nature of the desirable except so far as it assumes the nature of the good; and in this way also the true is desirable. But of its own nature it has radiance." (In I Sent., d. 31, q. 2, a. 1, ad 4.) And then in the De Veritate: "If appetite terminates in good and peace and the beautiful, this does not mean that it terminates in different goals. By the very fact of tending to good a thing at the same time tends to the beautiful and to peace. It tends to the beautiful inasmuch as it is proportioned and specified in itself. These notes are included in the essential character of good, but good adds a relationship of what is perfective in regard to other things. Whoever tends to good, then, by that very fact tends to the beautiful. Peace, moreover, implies the removal of disturbances or obstacles to the obtaining of good. By the very fact that something is desired, the removal of obstacles to it is also desired. Consequently, at the same time and by the same appetitive tendency good, the beautiful, and peace are sought." (De Ver., 22, 1, ad 12; Robert W. Schmidt's translation in: St. Thomas Aquinas, Truth, Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1954, Vol. 111, p. 40. Saint Thomas is commenting here on Denis the Areopagite's axiom in Chapter IV of the De Divinis Nominibus: pulchrum omnia appetunt, all things seek the beautiful.) 
Here finally are two texts of capital importance from the Summa Theologiae: "Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally, for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and this is why goodness is praised as beauty. But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to appetite (goodness being what all things desire), and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing). On the other hand, beauty relates to a cognitive power, for those things are said to be beautiful which please when seen. Hence beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is like them -- because the sense too is a sort of reason, as is every cognitive power. Now, since knowledge is by assimilation, and likeness relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause." (Summa theol., 1, 5, 4, ad 1; English translation from Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis. New York: Random House, 1945.) 
"The beautiful is the same thing as the good, differing only logically. For since good is what all things seek, it is of the nature of the good that by it the appetite is allayed; but it is of the nature of the beautiful that by the sight or knowledge of it the appetite is allayed. . . . Thus it is evident that the beautiful adds to the good a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that that is called good which simply pleases the appetite; whereas that is called beautiful whose mere apprehension gives pleasure."(Summa theol., I-II, 27, 1, ad 3.) 
To reconcile these different texts, it must first be observed that there are two ways in which the beautiful can be related to the appetite: either as subsumed under the aspect of the good and as the object of an elicited desire (we love and desire a thing because it is beautiful); or as a special good delighting the appetitive faculty in the faculty of knowledge because it satisfies the latter's natural desire (we say that a thing is beautiful because the sight of it gives us pleasure). From the first standpoint the beautiful coincides with the good only materially (re seu subjects); from the second, on the contrary, it is of the very notion of the beautiful to be the special good in question. 
It is from the first standpoint that the text from the Sentences must be considered: the beautiful is desirable only in so far as it assumes the aspect of the good (that is to say, generally speaking, of an object the possession of which appears to the subject as good and towards which he directs his desire). On these grounds the true also is desirable in the same way, and this desirability is of the very notion neither of the true nor of the beautiful, although it is an immediate property of the beautiful. But the fact remains that, from the second standpoint, to procure this special good which is delight in knowing is essential to the beautiful, implied in its very notion, and on these grounds there is no parallel between the beautiful and the true. 
Likewise in the text from the De Veritate it is a question of the good as such, which, unlike the beautiful, is defined by the perfection it brings to the subject. The beautiful and the good coincide therefore materially, but differ in notion or idea (like the true and the good) -- which does not prevent the beautiful, because it perfects the faculty of knowing as an object of delight, from including on these special grounds, in its very notion, a relation to appetite. 
As for the two extremely important texts from the Summa, it clearly follows from the first one that if the beautiful differs -- ratione -- from the good in that it does not directly face the appetite, and belongs of itself to the sphere of formal causality, nevertheless it has in its definition to give pleasure when seen, and therefore necessarily implies a relation to appetite. The second text teaches as precisely as could be desired that this relation to the appetite, on the special grounds of its being an object whose mere apprehension gives pleasure, is of the very notion of the beautiful. So that beauty, while directly facing the faculty of knowing, by its very essence indirectly concerns the appetitive faculty, as was said above. It is of the nature of the beautiful that by the sight or knowledge of it the appetite is allayed. 
58. Denis the Areopagite, De Div. Nomin., cap. 4; Saint Thomas, lect. 9. Let us, by virtue of time-honored actual usage, continue to call "the Areopagite" the man whom modern authorities call the pseudo-Denis. 
59. "Her have I loved, and have sought her out from my youth, and have desired to take her for my spouse, and I became a lover of her beauty." Wisdom, VIII, 2. 
60. De Divin. Nomin., cap. 4; Saint Thomas, lect. 10. 
61. Let us note that the conditions of the beautiful are much more strictly determined in nature than in art, the end of natural beings and the formal radiance which can shine in them being themselves much more strictly determined than those of works of art. In nature, for instance, there is assuredly a perfect type (whether we recognize it or not) of the proportions of the male or female body, because the natural end of the human organism is something fixed and invariably determined. But the beauty of a work of art not being the beauty of the object represented, painting and sculpture are in no way bound to the determined proportions and to the imitation of such a type. The art of pagan antiquity thought itself so bound because of an extrinsic condition, because it represented above all the gods of an anthropomorphic religion. 
62. "Ton theoeidê noun epilamponta." Plotinus, Enneads, I, 6. 
63. Cf. Lamennais, De l'art et du Beau (Paris: Garnier, 1864), Ch, I. 
64. "Beauty, health and the like are in a way said with respect to something else: because a certain mixture of humors produces health in a boy, but not in an old man; and what is health for a lion may mean death for a man. Health, therefore, is a proportion of humors in relation to a particular nature. In like manner beauty [of the body] consists in the proportion of its parts and colors; and so the beauty of one differs from the beauty of another." Saint Thomas, Comment. in Psalm., Ps. XLIV, 2. 
65. Saint Thomas, Comment. in lib. de Divin. Nomin., cap. 4, lect. 5. 
In an article entitled "Variations du Beau," published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1857 (Oeuvres littéraires, I, Études esthétiques, Paris, Crès, 1923, pp. 37 et seq.), Eugène Delacroix formulated from his painter's point of view some very just observations. Philosophizing on the question with more acumen than many professional philosophers, he had realized that the multiplicity of the forms of the beautiful in no way impairs its objectivity: "I have not said and nobody would dare to say that it can vary in its essence, for then it would no longer be the beautiful but mere caprice or fancy. But its character can change; a countenance of beauty which once charmed a far-off civilization does not astonish or please us as much as one which is more in accord with our feelings or, if you like, our prejudices. Nunquam in eodem statu permanet, said ancient Job of man." Here we have, in different terms, an affirmation of the fundamentally analogical character of the idea of beauty (cf. "Projet d'article sur le beau," ibid., pp. 141 et seq.). 
"We must see the beautiful where the artist has chosen to put it," said Delacroix again ("Questions sur le Beau," Rev. des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1854; ibid., p. 52); and already in his Journal (end of 1823 and beginning of 1824): "A Greek and an Englishman are each beautiful in his own way, which has nothing in common with the other" (Journal, Plon, 1893, vol. I, p. 47). 
66. In an essay published in 1923 ("L'Esthétique de saint Thomas" in S. Tommaso d'Aquino, Publ. della Fac. di Filos. dell'Univ. del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Vita et Pensiero), Father de Munnynck endeavored to cast doubt on this point. To do so is to conceive the quod visum placet and the Scholastic teaching on the beautiful in a wholly material manner (cf. Father Wébert's review, Bulletin thomiste, II Année, no. 1, Jan. 1925). The classic table of transcendentals (ens, res, unum, aliquid, verum, bonum) does not exhaust all the transcendental values, and if the beautiful is not included, it is because it can be reduced to one of them (to the good -- for the beautiful is that which in things faces the mind as an object of intuitive delight). Saint Thomas constantly affirms that the beautiful and the (metaphysical) good are the same thing in reality and differ only in notion or idea (pulchrum et bonum sunt idem subjecto, sola ratione different, I, 5, 4, ad 1). It is so with all the transcendentals: they are identified in the thing, and they differ in idea. Wherefore, whoever tends to good, by that very fact tends to the beautiful (De Ver., 22, 1, ad 12). If it is true that the beautiful is the same thing as the good, differing only in idea (I-II, 27, 1, ad 3), why should the beautiful not be a transcendental as well as the good? Strictly speaking, Beauty is the radiance of all the transcendentals united. Wherever there is anything existing, there is being, form and proportion; and wherever there is being, form and proportion, there is some beauty. Beauty is in the things of sense, and it is also -- and par excellence -- in spiritual things. The bonum honestum -- good as right, the quality of an act good for the sake of good -- has a spiritual beauty: "A thing is said to be good in itself (honestum) according as it has some quality of excellence worthy of honor because of its spiritual beauty" (II-II, 145, 3). Beauty is to be found in the contemplative life essentially and per se: "Beauty consists in a certain radiance and due proportion. . . . In the contemplative life, which consists in the activity of reason, beauty is found per se and essentially" (ibid., 180, 2, ad 3). Beauty is properly (formally-eminently) attributed to God, like being, unity and goodness. "Because (divine) Beauty is in so many ways the cause of all things," Saint Thomas teaches (Comment. in De Divin. Nomin., cap. 4, lect. 5), "it follows that the good and the beautiful are the same; because all things desire the beautiful and the good, as cause, in every way; and because there is nothing which does not participate in the beautiful and the good, since everything whatsoever is beautiful and good according to its own form." Likewise, beauty is to be ascribed, in a more appropriate manner, to the Person of the Son (Summa theol., I, 39, 8). 
The property of causing joy, of "giving pleasure," implicit in the notion of the beautiful, is itself -- it must be remembered -- of the transcendental and analogical sphere, and cannot without serious misunderstanding be reduced to pleasure of the senses alone or the "bonum delectabile" considered as opposed to the other kinds of good. (Honesta etiam sunt delectabilia, Saint Thomas observes, Summa theol., I, 5, 6, ad 2; and II-II, 145, 3: Honestum est naturaliter homini delectabile. . . . Omne utile et honestum, est aliqualiter delectabile, sed non convertitur. Moreover, does not virtue have for result to make difficult things pleasing? Is not God the supreme analogate of all that dispenses joy? Intra in gaudium Domini tui.) It is because the delight implied by the beautiful is thus of the transcendental and analogical sphere, that the diversity of modes of this delight, and of the forms of beauty, in no way prevents the objectivity of beauty. Cf. note 65. 
67. The analogates (analoga analogata) of an analogous concept (analogum analogans) are the diverse things in which this concept is realized and which it fits. 
68. In God alone are all these perfections identified according to their formal reason: in Him Truth is Beauty, is Goodness, is Unity, and they are He. In the things of this world, on the other hand, truth, beauty, goodness, etc., are aspects of being distinct according to their formal reason, and what is true simpliciter (absolutely speaking) may be good or beautiful only secundum quid (in a certain relation), what is beautiful simpliciter may be good or true only secundum quid . . . . Wherefore beauty, truth, goodness (especially when it is no longer a question of metaphysical or transcendental good itself, but of moral good) command distinct spheres of human activity, of which it would be foolish to deny a priori the possible conflicts, on the pretext that the transcendentals are indissolubly bound to one another -- a perfectly true metaphysical principle, but one that needs to be correctly understood. 
69. De Divinis Nominibus, cap. 4; Saint Thomas' Commentary, lessons 5 and 6. 
70. Saint Thomas, ibid., lect. 5. 
71. Summa theol., I, 39, 8. 
72. Saint Augustine, De Doctr. Christ., I, 5. 
73. Baudelaire, L'Art romantique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1885), p. 167. Baudelaire reproduces here a passage from his preface to Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires, and this passage itself was inspired by and almost a translation of a passage in Poe's The Poetic Principle: "We have still a thirst unquenchable. thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravina supposes, through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. 
"The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness -- this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted -- has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic." (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, New York, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1904, Vol. I, pp. 30-31. 
It is remarkable that from a different point of view a philosopher should also write: "In the appreciation of music and of pictures we get a momentary and fleeting glimpse of the nature of that reality to a full knowledge of which the movement of life is progressing. For that moment, and for so long as the glimpse persists, we realize in anticipation and almost, as it were, illicitly, the nature of the end. We are, if I may so put it, for the moment there, just as a traveller may obtain a fleeting glimpse of a distant country from an eminence passed on the way, and cease for a space from his journey to enjoy the view. And since we are for the moment there, we experience while the moment lasts that sense of liberation from the urge and drive of life, which has been noted as one of the special characteristics of aesthetic experience." (C. E. M. Joad, "A Realist Philosophy of Life," in Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements, Second Series. Edited by J. H. Muirhead, New York, Macmillan, 1925, p. 188.) 
74. Denis the Areopagite, De Divin. Nomin., cap. 4 (Saint Thomas, lect. 4). 
75. Opusc. LXVIII, in libr. Boetii de Hebdom., in princ. 
76. Prov., VIII, 31. 
77. Metaph., I, 2, 982 b. 
78. Ruysbroeck ("Vie de Rusbrock," in Rusbrock l'Admirable, Oeuvres choisies, ed. E. Hello, Paris, Perrin et Cie, 1902, p. Lii.)

The Idea of Beauty 
Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
 When, wanting something, I call it good, the statement that the object wanted appears good to me is a statement primarily about me and about the object only in relation to me. Unless you suspect that I am trying to deceive you about my desire in this instance, you will accept my statement as true.
You may, however, challenge it by telling me that what appears good to me is not really good, but the very opposite. You would then be making a statement about the object, not about me, a statement the truth of which you and I might reasonably argue about.
If I call something beautiful because I derive pleasure simply from beholding or contemplating it, that statement is also a statement primarily about me and about the object only in relation to me. Eliminating any suspicion of deception on my part, you will accept my statement as true.
Here, however, you cannot challenge it by telling me that the object in which I find beauty is not really enjoyable by me, but the very opposite. You may say that it gives you no pleasure to contemplate it, but this difference of opinion between us is a difference in taste that is not worth arguing about.
If the beautiful is identified with the enjoyable -- with that which affords us the kind of enjoyment that is the purely disinterested pleasure derived from contemplating the object -- there is no escaping the conclusion we have reached that beauty lies entirely in the eye of the beholder and is merely a matter of taste. But there is another sense in which, when we call an object beautiful, we are speaking about the object itself, and not about ourselves or about the object in relation to us.
We call the object beautiful because it has certain properties that make it admirable. It has those properties whether or not its having them results in its being enjoyable by you or me. If the admirable were universally enjoyable, then beautiful objects would always be subjectively experienced as beautiful also; that is, everyone would derive pleasure or enjoyment from contemplating them. But that is not the case, as everyone knows.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether there is any relation between the admirability of the object and its enjoyability by individuals differing in their temperaments, sensibilities, nurture, and culture. It should be noted, in any case, that admiration is just as much an expression of taste as enjoyment is; but with one difference. Enjoyment is immediate. Admiration may be mediated by thought and dependent upon knowledge.
The properties that make an object admirable have been variously named by writers about beauty.
Aristotle wrote, "To be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude. Beauty is a matter of size and order. ..."
Aquinas said that the beautiful object is one that has unity, proportion, and clarity. It is a complex whole having parts. When the parts are so organized and proportioned to one another that the complex structure of its wholeness is perspicuous or manifest (i.e., not obscured by any discordant or inharmonious element), the object thus constituted is beautiful. It is admirable for its intrinsic excellence or perfection.
Children used to be taught that in order to write a good composition, one that has intrinsic excellence or perfection, they should try to produce one that has unity, clarity, and coherence. In carpentry shops, they were, and still may be, taught that to make a good chair or table, they have to put the parts together in a way that produces a well-organized whole in which the parts are properly proportioned to one another. A poorly made chair may not be useful in serving the purpose for which chairs are made; but, quite apart from the question of its usefulness, a poorly made chair is not admirable. It lacks the perfection or intrinsic excellence of a well-made chair.
What has just been said about pieces of writing and products of carpentry applies to all works of human art -- all man-made objects. Some may be made for use, as chairs and tables are. Some may be made for the enjoyment of contemplators, as poems, statues, paintings, and symphonies are. Some may be made for both use and enjoyment, as buildings are.
Sometimes an object made for use may become one that is contemplated with enjoyment, as a fine piece of furniture roped off in a museum. Sometimes an object made for enjoyment by contemplators may become one that is used for some practical purpose, as a painting hung to cover a stain on the wall.
But, regardless of the purpose for which it is made, how it is made, or how it is employed, anything that a human being makes is either well made or poorly made. It either has or lacks the intrinsic excellence or perfection that is appropriate to that kind of thing. It either is admirable or not.
If we turn from works of art to the things of nature, we speak of those that have intrinsic excellence or perfection as being well formed, not well made. Striking deformities are to be found among all living things. Horticulturists root out deformed growths or try to correct them. Animal breeders eliminate from the breeding process the less well formed in order to produce more perfect specimens of the kind in question.
At flower shows and dog or cat shows, judges award blue ribbons or gold medals to the best of kind or breed -- the rose or orchid, the dog or cat that is more admirable for its intrinsic excellence or perfection as that kind of living organism. The winning specimen is declared to possess all the qualities that an individual instance of that kind should have, and to be devoid of any blemishes or flaws.
The beautiful as the admirable is the same in works of art and the things of nature. In both spheres, the object admired as beautiful possesses an intrinsic excellence or perfection that is appropriate to that kind of thing, whether a product of nature or of art. The only difference is that in the sphere of art, we speak of the admirable as the well-made; in the sphere of nature, we speak of it as the well-formed.
It may be pointed out that the flowers, dogs, or cats exhibited at shows or fairs are not purely products of nature, since human effort has intervened to achieve the perfection of breeding or development that may win a prize. That, however, does not affect the point under consideration. The admirable perfection of the wellformed organism is often found in nature untouched by human hands.
Acquiescing in everything that has been said so far, the reader may interpose questions that certainly deserve to be asked. Who says what is admirable or not? The judgment that an object is admirable for its intrinsic excellence or perfection may be a judgment about the object itself, about the properties it possesses, but does that make the judgment objective rather than subjective? Is it a judgment that has objective truth -- one that belongs in the sphere of truth rather than in the sphere of taste and so one that is worth arguing about to get at the truth of the matter?
To the first question -- Who says what is admirable? -- the answer has already been indicated. It is the English teacher, not the student, who judges whether the composition turned in has the unity, clarity, and coherence required for the production of a well-made piece of writing. It is the carpentry instructor, not the student, who judges whether or not the table or chair turned out in shop is admirable for the intrinsic excellence of a well-made chair or table. So, too, in all exhibits of living organisms in which entries compete for prizes, the awards are made by experts selected for their competence as judges to determine the most admirable or beautiful of the specimens exhibited.
The judgment about the beauty of an object in terms of its admirability for intrinsic excellence or perfection is the judgment of an expert, with special knowledge and skill in judging specimens of a certain kind. One would not ask the English teacher to judge the products of the carpentry shop, or the carpentry instructor to judge English compositions. One would not ask the judges selected for a dog or cat show to judge the roses or orchids exhibited at a flower show.
This is not to say that the experts cannot disagree. They often do, and the awards are, therefore, made by averaging the points given the objects by a panel of judges. The spectators may also disagree with the final results, thinking that the specimen awarded second place is more admirable than the one given the blue ribbon or gold medal as the most beautiful object of its kind. But there is a difference between the disagreement of the experts with one another and the disagreement between the laymen and the experts.
The skilled judges can argue reasonably with one another about the points scored by the specimens under consideration; it is quite possible for such argument to result in a change of opinion and an altered final result. But the layman cannot argue with the judges in a way that might persuade them to change their minds. If he could, he would be an expert himself, not a layman.
In the sphere of the fine arts -- the arts called, in French and German, the arts of the beautiful -- there are also expert judges and mere laymen who lack the knowledge and skill possessed by the expert in a particular field of art. The persons who are acknowledged literary or musical critics, or connoisseurs of painting and sculpture, may differ more frequently or more radically in their opinions about the admirable beauty of a particular work than do the judges at flower, dog, or cat shows. But it still remains the case that they are in a position to argue reasonably with one another, with the hope that one can persuade another to change his opinion, whereas mere laymen cannot argue with them, either reasonably or fruitfully.
Is, then, the judgment of beauty that is based on the admirability of an object for its intrinsic excellence or perfection a matter of truth or a matter of taste? The answer depends on how we answer another question. Does the distinction that is generally acknowledged between the mere laymen and the skilled, knowledgeable expert in a particular field carry with it acknowledgment of a difference between inferior and superior taste?
Must it not be the case that to have superior taste is to have the ability to perceive correctly the superiority of one object over another for its intrinsic excellence or perfection? What would superior taste mean if the person having it could not make a reasonable and well-grounded judgment about which of two objects was the more admirable?
In short, must we not conclude that, though judgments about the admirable beauty of objects are expressions of taste on the part of those who make such judgments, expert judges have superior taste that enables them to rank objects correctly in a way that accords with the degree to which they possess intrinsic excellence or perfection?
That conclusion has two corollaries. The first is that, while judgments of the admirable beauty of objects are expressions of taste, they are also judgments that can have a certain measure of objective truth -- judgments about which reasonable and profitable argument can occur among experts. De gustibus non disputandum est does not apply to the experts in a particular field.
The second corollary is that the degrees of admirable beauty attributed to objects is objective, not subjective; that is, it pertains to the condition of the object, not to the state of mind or feeling of the subject making the judgment. If one object were not in its intrinsic properties superior to another, the person who judged it as the more admirable could not be said to have superior taste as compared with the person who made the opposite judgment. Only if there are gradations of excellence or perfection in the objects themselves, making one more admirable than another, can there be gradations in the scale of taste, making expert judges superior to laymen and, even among experts, making one judge superior to another.
Those who hold the view that beauty is objective rather than subjective go further and assert a third corollary; namely, that the more admirable or beautiful an object is in itself, the more enjoyable it must be universally -- to all human beings at all times and places and under all circumstances of nurture and culture. What is objectively beautiful because of its admirable intrinsic excellence or perfection must also be subjectively beautiful, enjoyable or pleasing to all who behold or contemplate it.
The view just set forth cannot be defended. The objective and subjective aspects of beauty are not correlated. That which, in the judgment of experts in a particular field, may be admirable beauty in an object is not always and uniformly enjoyable. It may please one individual who contemplates it, and not another. In fact, to acknowledge that some individuals are persons of poor or uncultivated taste is to recognize that they are likely to enjoy less rather than more admirable objects.
If a person's taste can be cultivated and improved with regard to a certain kind of object, the individual is more likely to enjoy objects that, in the judgment of experts, are more admirable. But this does not alter the basic fact that enjoyable beauty is one thing and admirable beauty another.
The individual who derives disinterested pleasure from the contemplation of objects that lack intrinsic excellence or perfection, or have an inferior degree of it, is thoroughly justified in regarding such objects as beautiful because they provide the enjoyment appropriate to calling them beautiful. They have for that individual the beauty of the enjoyable even if they lack the beauty of the admirable in the judgment of experts, or persons of superior taste.
Because there are these two distinct senses in which objects can be called beautiful (as admirable and as enjoyable), beauty has both an objective and a subjective dimension. The trouble is that the two dimensions do not run parallel to one another.
Much of the confusion that is prevalent in discussions of beauty comes from not recognizing this fact. The person who calls an object beautiful because he enjoys it is often interpreted as meaning that it is also admirable because of its intrinsic excellence or perfection. That individual often misinterprets his own expression of subjective taste as possessing an objective significance that it does not have.
Many of us as laymen in a given field would like to think that an object that pleases us should be equally enjoyable to others. We often go so far as to say that they ought to enjoy what we enjoy. Expert judges in a given field of objects are even more disposed to say that everyone ought to enjoy the objects they judge more admirable for the beauty of their intrinsic excellence or perfection, or at least to recommend that everyone's taste ought to be cultivated and improved to the point where they would find the more admirable also more enjoyable.
Prescriptive oughts do not apply to enjoyment. No one can tell another person what he ought or ought not to enjoy, as one can tell another what he ought or ought not to desire (because it is really good or really bad); or as one person can tell another what he ought or ought not to affirm as true (because evidence and reasoning support the proposition in question rather than its opposite, either beyond the shadow of a doubt, or beyond a reasonable doubt, or by a preponderance of evidence and reasons in its favor).
The only ought that would seem to be admissible in the sphere of the enjoyable is one that is an educational prescription. We think that education should result in the formation of a mind that thinks as it ought, judging correctly about the truth and falsity of propositions. We think that education should result in the formation of a virtuous moral character, one that desires aright or chooses as it ought with regard to good and evil. To carry this one step further, from the spheres of truth and goodness to the sphere of beauty, we need only say that education should result in the formation of good taste so that the individual comes to enjoy that which is admirable, and to derive more enjoyment from objects that have greater intrinsic excellence or perfection. Beyond this one cannot go. One cannot prescribe what everyone ought to find enjoyable because of its admirable intrinsic properties.
Not only must we acquiesce in the relativity of enjoyable beauty to the taste of the individual at whatever level of cultivation it may be. We must also recognize that enjoyable beauty is relative to the cultural circumstances of the individual as well as to his innate temperament and his nurture. Peoples of diverse cultures differ radically with respect to the objects in which they find enjoyable beauty. A Westerner in Japan may be left cold in the presence of a Zen garden or a Kabuki performance that the Japanese contemplate for hours with rapt enjoyment. A European may not find enjoyable beauty in African sculpture, or an African in Western abstract painting.
The relativity of beauty to cultural differences extends from enjoyable to admirable beauty. Those who have the expertness to make them competent judges of Western painting may be mere laymen when it comes to admiring Chinese or Japanese screens. Even within the broad scope of Western culture, experts competent to judge classical sculptures or Byzantine mosaics may not have comparable competence when it comes to admiring impressionist or postimpressionist paintings.
The person who says, as many do, "I do not know whether that object is beautiful, but I know what I like, and I do like it," should understand himself to be acknowledging the disconnection between enjoyable and admirable beauty. He is, in effect, saying, "I do not know what expert judges would think about the intrinsic excellence or perfection of the object in question, but I do know that it pleases me to behold or contemplate. It may or may not be admirable in the judgment of experts, but I enjoy it nevertheless."
There is one further difference to be noted between the expert judgment of admirable beauty and the expression of taste for enjoyable beauty, whether by experts or by laymen. It requires us to recall Immanuel Kant's observation that the apprehension of an object from which we derive disinterested pleasure is nonconceptual. It is the apprehension or contemplation of that individual object as such, not as a particular instance of one or another kind of object.
Contrariwise, the expert judgment of the admirable beauty of an object based on its intrinsic excellence or perfection cannot be a judgment devoid of conceptual content because it is always a judgment about the individual object, not as an individual, but as a particular instance of a certain kind.
The knowledge that is involved in being an expert is knowledge about the kind, specimens of which are being judged. The skill of the expert is skill in discriminating the degrees of excellence possessed by less and more admirable specimens of the kind in question. That is why the person who is an expert judge of Greek temples will probably not be an expert judge of Gothic cathedrals, and why the person who is an expert judge of flowers is unlikely to be an expert judge of dogs.
The objectivity of truth lies in the fact that what is true for an individual who happens to be in error is not true at all. The objectivity of goodness lies in the fact that what is called good by an individual whose wants are contrary to his needs is not really good for him or for anyone else. What is true for the person whose judgment is sound ought to be regarded as true by everyone else. What is good for the person whose desires are right ought to be regarded as good by everyone else.
When we come to beauty, the parallelism fails. What is enjoyable beauty for the individual whose taste is poor and who derives pleasure from inferior objects is really enjoyable beauty for him regardless of what anyone else thinks, including the experts. What is admirable beauty in the judgment of the experts may not be enjoyable beauty for many laymen; nor can we say that they ought to admire as well as enjoy it because of its intrinsic excellence. All we can say, perhaps, is that they ought to learn to enjoy what is admirable.
At the bottom line, it remains the case that the enjoyable belongs to the sphere of the subjective -- a matter of individual taste about which there is no point in arguing. The best wine experts in the world may all agree that a certain red Bordeaux of a certain vintage is a supreme specimen of claret. It does not follow that an individual who prefers white wine to red, or Burgundies to clarets, or has a taste for whiskey rather than for wine, must necessarily enjoy drinking the wine accorded the gold medal by the experts.
What is true of wines is true of everything else that, on the one hand, can be judged for its admirable intrinsic excellence and, on the other hand, may or may not give pleasure or enjoyment to the taste of individuals.
One concluding observation. Readers who feel dissatisfied or disappointed by what I have been able to say about admirable beauty -- the intrinsic excellence of objects judged admirable by experts -- have reason on their side. They are justified in expecting something more: a clear and precise statement of the features shared in common by all instances of admirable beauty, whether in nature or in works of art, and in any and every sphere of art.
I sympathize with such dissatisfaction or disappointment. I have suffered it myself. Expert judges in a given field of art may be able to state the underlying principles or criteria of intrinsic excellence in that sphere of workmanship. They seldom can do so unanimously. But even if they were all to agree about the objective criteria of admirable beauty in the field in which they were experts, even if they all subscribed to principles by conformity to which a judgment concerning the admirable beauty of a certain object could claim to be true, that would still be insufficient.
More can be reasonably expected of the philosopher who undertakes to deal with the idea of beauty. In dealing with the ideas of truth and goodness, the philosopher discharges his intellectual responsibility. He is able to tell us what truth and goodness consist in, not in some particular domain, but universally. That intellectual responsibility the philosopher does not seem able to discharge in dealing with the idea of beauty.
I would have wished to write this chapter in a philosophical manner not disappointing to its readers, not failing to provide the clear and precise statement about what beauty objectively consists in, which they have good reason to expect. I have failed for two reasons. One is that I am not able to find that clear and precise statement in the literature of the subject. The other is that I lack the insight or wisdom needed to supply it myself.
Disappointed readers must, therefore, convert their dissatisfaction by transforming it into a challenge -- to do for themselves what has yet to be done by anyone. To do what? To say what is common to -- what universal qualities are present in -- the admirable beauty of a prize-winning rose, Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, a triple play in the ninth inning of a baseball game, Michelangelo's Pieta, a Zen garden, Milton's sonnet on his blindness, a display of fireworks, and so on.

SOURCE: http://radicalacademy.com/adlerideaofbeauty.htm 

Some Thoughts on Beauty
Mortimer Adler, Ph.D.
 Much has been said on the subject of beauty that will not bear close scrutiny. What is said is often moving, even uplifting. It frequently gives one the sense of being on the verge of getting at the heart of the matter, but like epigrammatic discourse at its best, it leaves one unsure that the promise of penetrating in sights can be fulfilled by patient thought expressed in plain speech.
The test of the intelligibility of any statement that overwhelms us with its air of profundity is its translatability into language that lacks the elevation and verve of the original statement but can pass muster as a simple and clear statement in ordinary, everyday speech. Most of what has been written about beauty will not survive this test. In the presence of many of the most eloquent statements about beauty, we are left speechless -- speechless in the sense that we cannot find other words for expressing what we think or hope we understand.
This is not to say that, in the discussion of the great ideas, there has been more disagreement about beauty than about truth and goodness. With regard to beauty as with regard to truth and goodness, the same fundamental issues are argued, issues concerning their objectivity and subjectivity. The difference lies in the fact that with regard to truth and goodness, the issues can be addressed with a clarity that is lacking in the case of beauty.
There is less that can be said about beauty with clarity and precision than can be said about truth and goodness. In the pages that follow, I am going to limit myself to observations that can be expressed in the language of common speech and to distinctions that I think are immediately intelligible to common sense.
I will carry the analysis no further than it can go within these limits. This may leave many questions unanswered for the reader, but he or she will at least understand the questions that have not been answered.
In the tradition of Western thought, two writers -- and only two -- provide the guidance we need to proceed along the lines just indicated. One is a thirteenth-century theologian, Thomas Aquinas; the other, an eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. While these two do not agree with each other on all points, certain observations made by Kant help us to understand certain words used by Aquinas that are critical terms in his definition of the beautiful.
"The beautiful," Aquinas writes, "is that which pleases us upon being seen." In this definition of the beautiful, the two critical terms are "pleases" and "seen."
Many things please us and please us in different ways, but everything that pleases us is not beautiful. If we use the word "pleases" as a synonym for "satisfies," then any good that we desire pleases or satisfies us when, coming into possession of that good, our desire for it is calmed, put to rest, or made quiescent .
Pleasure itself, bodily or sensual pleasure, is among the goods that human beings desire. We have a natural craving for sensory experiences that have the quality of being pleasant rather than unpleasant. It is also the case that some human beings, generally regarded as abnormal, have a predilection for pain -- for physical pain or for sensory experiences that are unpleasant in quality rather than pleasant. When these desires, normal or abnormal, are gratified, we are pleased or satisfied.
When sensual pleasure or pain is an object of desire, it does not differ from food or drink, wealth or health, knowledge or friendship, as something needed or wanted. Anything needed or wanted is something that pleases or satisfies us when we get it. How, among all the things that please or satisfy us, shall we identify the special character of the beautiful as an object that pleases us?
The answer to this question can be found in Aquinas's definition. The object we call beautiful is one that pleases us in a very special way -- "upon being seen". Food and drink, health and wealth, and most of the other goods we need or want please us upon being possessed. It is having them, to use or consume, that pleases us. They please us when they satisfy our desire to have them, not just to see them.
Here Kant throws light on the special character of the pleasure afforded by objects we call beautiful by telling us that the pleasure must be a totally disinterested one. What Kant means by "disinterested" is that the object falls outside the sphere of our practical concerns. It is an object we may or may not desire to acquire, to possess, to use, consume, or in some other way incorporate into our lives or ourselves. We may be quite content simply to contemplate or behold it. Doing just that, and nothing more, gives us the special delight or joy that we derive from objects that please us upon being seen. And if, in addition, we do desire to possess it, we do not regard it as beautiful because of that fact.
The person who says, as many do, "I do not know whether that object is beautiful, but I know what I like, and I do like it," should understand himself to be acknowledging the disconnection between enjoyable and admirable beauty. He is, in effect, saying, "I do not know what expert judges would think about the intrinsic excellence or perfection of the object in question, but I do know that it pleases me to behold or contemplate. It may or may not be admirable in the judgment of experts, but I enjoy it nevertheless."
There is one further difference to be noted between the expert judgment of admirable beauty and the expression of taste for enjoyable beauty, whether by experts or by laymen. It requires us to recall Immanuel Kant's observation that the apprehension of an object from which we derive disinterested pleasure is nonconceptual. It is the apprehension or contemplation of that individual object as such, not as a particular instance of one or another kind of object.
Contrariwise, the expert judgment of the admirable beauty of an object based on its intrinsic excellence or perfection can not be a judgment devoid of conceptual content because it is always a judgment about the individual object, "not as an individual", but as a particular instance of a certain kind.
The knowledge that is involved in being an expert is knowledge about the kind, specimens of which are being judged. The skill of the expert is skill in discriminating the degrees of excellence possessed by less and more admirable specimens of the kind in question. That is why the person who is an expert judge of Greek temples will probably not be an expert judge of Gothic cathedrals, and why the person who is an expert judge of flowers is unlikely to be an expert judge of dogs.
The objectivity of truth lies in the fact that what is true for an individual who happens to be in error is not true at all. The objectivity of goodness lies in the fact that what is called good by an individual whose wants are contrary to his needs is not really good for him or for anyone else. What is true for the person whose judgment is sound ought to be regarded as true by everyone else. What is good for the person whose desires are right ought to be regarded as good by everyone else.
When we come to beauty, the parallelism fails. What is enjoyable beauty for the individual whose taste is poor and who derives pleasure from inferior objects is really enjoyable beauty for him regardless of what anyone else thinks, including the experts. What is admirable beauty in the judgment of the experts may not be enjoyable beauty for many laymen; nor can we say that they ought to admire as well as enjoy it because of its intrinsic excellence. All we can say, perhaps, is that they ought to learn to enjoy what is admirable.
At the bottom line, it remains the case that the enjoyable belongs to the sphere of the subjective -- a matter of individual taste about which there is no point in arguing. The best wine experts in the world may all agree that a certain red Bordeaux of a certain vintage is a supreme specimen of claret. It does not follow that an individual who prefers white wine to red, or Burgundies to clarets, or has a taste for whiskey rather than for wine, must necessarily enjoy drinking the wine accorded the gold medal by the experts.
What is true of wines is true of everything else that, on the one hand, can be judged for its admirable intrinsic excellence and, on the other hand, may or may not give pleasure or enjoyment to the taste of individuals.
One concluding observation. readers who feel dissatisfied or disappointed by what I have been able to say about admirable beauty -- the intrinsic excellence of objects judged admirable by experts -- have reason on their side. They are justified in expecting something more: a clear and precise statement of the features shared in common by all instances of admirable beauty, whether in nature or in works of art, and in any and every sphere of art.
I sympathize with such dissatisfaction or disappointment. I have suffered it myself. Expert judges in a given field of art may be able to state the underlying principles or criteria of intrinsic excellence in that sphere of workmanship. They seldom can do so unanimously. But even if they were all to agree about the objective criteria of admirable beauty in the field in which they were experts, even if they all subscribed to principles by conformity to which a judgment concerning the admirable beauty of a certain object could claim to be true, that would still be insufficient.
More can be reasonably expected of the philosopher who undertakes to deal with the idea of beauty. In dealing with the ideas of truth and goodness, the philosopher discharges his intellectual responsibility. He is able to tell us what truth and goodness consist in, not in some particular domain, but universally. That intellectual responsibility the philosopher does not seem able to discharge in dealing with the idea of beauty.
I would have wished to write this in a philosophical manner not disappointing to its readers, not failing to provide the clear and precise statement about what beauty objectively consists in, which they have good reason to expect. I have failed for two reasons. One is that I am not able to find that clear and precise statement in the literature of the subject. The other is that I lack the insight or wisdom needed to supply it myself.
Disappointed readers must, therefore, convert their dissatisfaction by transforming it into a challenge -- to do for themselves what has yet to be done by anyone. To do what? To say what is common to -- what universal qualities are present in -- the admirable beauty of a prize-winning rose, Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, a triple play in the ninth inning of a baseball game, Michelangelo's Pieta, a Zen garden, Milton's sonnet on his blindness, a display of fireworks, and so on.

SOURCE: http://radicalacademy.com/adleronbeauty.htm 

Beauty, Contemplation and the Virgin Mary [1]
Sr. Thomas Mary McBride, O.P.

St. Thomas, in his exposition of Dionysius, holds that both God and creatures are beautiful.  Since God, the supreme Beauty, is his own existence, ipsum esse subsistens, and all things have being by participating in his existence, beauty can be found in all existing beings. [2]
He [Dionysius] shows how God is the Cause of brilliance, when he adds that God with a flash sends down to all creatures a share of His luminous ray, and it is the source of all light.  These glittering communications of the divine ray should be understood according to the participation of likeness.  And these communications are "pulchrifying," that is, producing beauty in things. [3]
St. Thomas continues his exposition:
“Brilliance pertains to the consideration of beauty....  Every form, by which a thing has being [esse], is a participation in the divine brilliance.  This is why he [Dionysius] adds that 'individual things' are 'beautiful according to a character of their own,' that is, in accord with a proper form.  Hence it is clear that the being [esse] of all things is derived from the divine Beauty.” [4]
In his Summa Theologiae St. Thomas gives three distinguishing characteristics of beauty: wholeness or integrity, proportion or harmony, and claritas which can be translated splendor, radiance, light, brilliance.  The chief characteristic is claritas, 'radiance' ... beautiful things shine. [5]
The beautiful illuminates our intellectus with the intuition of understanding.  The eyes and ears of our soul enable our vision to see the transcendent beauty present ontologically in all being. [6]
Hans Urs von Balthasar expresses it succinctly:
“The beautiful is above all a Form, and the light does not fall on this Form from above and from outside, rather it breaks forth from the Form's interior.” [7]
This paper will endeavor to highlight beauty of spirit, the inner splendor which radiates from the form and bears witness to what beauty really is. [8]
St. Thomas, in his Quaestiones Disputatae De veritate, distinguishes between the true and the good, and presents the insight that a spiritual substance relates to reality in two different ways.  A human being directs himself at things by knowing them and desiring them.  The object of knowledge is truth, while the object of desire is the good.  "Cognitio et voluntas radicantur in substantia spirituali super diversas habitudines eius ad res" (De verit. 23.1). [ 9]  This writer would suggest a third way of relating to reality in which knowledge and desire are united in breathtaking vision. The splendor of truth and goodness radiating from the form captivates the one who sees with love, [10] drawing him or her into a third way of ecstatic contemplation and intuitive wisdom.  Beauty, therefore, is essentially a gift, a radiant vision presented to the eyes or ears of the beholder, a seeing or hearing of being clearly, that is, in the radiance of its inner splendor, claritas.
This third way of ecstatic contemplation partakes of cognition as a gift of wondrous seeing with the eyes of the spirit.  It is more than a knowing by which the known is in the knower, although it is that, but rather a being taken out of oneself by which the knower is in the known.  Beauty is therefore not so much an assimilation as a being assimilated. [11]  St. Thomas in speaking of contemplation says: "To suffer ecstacy means to be placed outside oneself." [12]  This happens not by a movement toward the beautiful but rather by a dispositive attitude of receptivity in which one is inundated with love, peace and joy in the splendor of truth and goodness being revealed.  Commenting on Dionysius, (In Dion. de div. nom. 4.10), St. Thomas says that it belongs to the notion of the beautiful that apprehension finds its rest in its sight, or cognition. [13] Beauty is the gifted perfection of seeing. It unites the intellect and will in the innermost sanctuary of the soul. 
In the light of the above this writer would suggest that the proper place of beauty is in the spirit.  The vision of beauty radiates and bears witness to the spiritual reality of esse shining in the res, awakening the most intimate depths of the human person.  It captivates the mind and will in contemplative wonder and ecstatic contemplation.  Beauty integrates the splendor of light with ecstatic joy.  Ultimately, the vision of beauty bears witness to the divine beauty "which shines with dazzling light....  While remaining completely intangible and invisible, it fills minds that know how to close their eyes with the most beautiful splendours." [14]  Beauty is "intimior intimo meo" (St. Augustine, Conf., 1,3,6,11); it is a sign of the presence of God in all creation. 
The divine beauty, shining through creaturely being, can perhaps be more easily contemplated in the figure of the Virgin Mary.  Mary, by reason of her fullness of grace and immaculate conception, is the most perfect example of beauty in created being.  Johann Roten, S.M., in a philosophically based article, "Mary, the Way of Beauty," [15] reiterates Thomistic teaching by saying that what makes Mary truly beautiful is the splendor of form.  For St. Albert the Great as well as for St. Thomas Aquinas, the identifying concept of beauty is splendor of form (3 Sent., d.23, q.3.al, sol.1,ad 2; ST Ia 5,4, ad1).  Although there may be a certain beauty in sensible appearance, the greater beauty comes from the inward metaphysical form, since it is the essence that enlightens the mind and constitutes the esse of the res.  According to St. Albert, where the shining light of essence is able to overcome the opacity of its material density and manifest itself in outward appearance, there is beauty (St. Albert, De pulchro et bono, qI, a.2.). [16]
Therefore what makes Mary truly beautiful is the splendor of form.  Only the splendor of the metaphysical form outshines the actual form in Mary. 
Mary's "form" is graced with the surplus of the divine.  Mary's form is the work of the Holy Spirit, modeling cause of all that is. 
What our eyes and ears perceive in Mary is the humble servant of the Lord.  This is the outward form of her personality. [But] her outward form is bathed in and literally drowning in the splendor of the inward form – her immaculate conception and fullness of grace.  In Mary there is far more than what meets the eye.  The overwhelming splendor of her figure reveals the trinitarian groundedness of her being. [17]
Paul IV, in an address to the 1975 Mariological Congress held in Rome, linked Mary, "the woman clothed with the Sun" (Rev 12:1) with the divine beauty of the Holy Spirit, the one "in whom the pure radiance of human beauty meets the tremendous but accessible beauty of divinity." [18]  The human beauty of her being shines like the sun because of the divine beauty in which she participates unimpeded.
The Virgin Mary stands as an icon at the pinnacle of creation revealing the beauty hidden in created being.  In all being there is more than meets the eye. [19] The beauty of Mary reveals the beauty hidden in each being, as Cause present in effect, according to its place in the hierarchy of being. 
The reality of beauty as a transcendental quality of being invites one to enter the world of contemplation wherein beauty gives herself freely and without personal regard.
Beauty introduces one to the inexhaustible riches of being and makes one realize the gratuitous character of all being.  True beauty is the privilege of love, because love alone is able to detect beauty as gift freely given. Beauty contains meaning, amazement, joyful and grateful understanding. [20]
Mary, the bearer of Him who is Beauty, invites the contemplative to participate in her own wondrous gaze, a gifted perfection of seeing that is sustained and directed by the Holy Spirit of divine love.
COME TO ME, ALL YOU WHO YEARN FOR ME, AND BE FILLED WITH MY FRUITS. [21]           
1. This article holds the position that St. Thomas Aquinas regards beauty as a transcendental property of being.
2. Expositio in Dion. De div. Nom. 4.5-6 as quoted in The Pocket Aquinas, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (New York: Washington Square Press, 4th ed., 1965), p. 269.
3. Ibid., pp. 269-270.
4. Ibid., p. 272.
5. ST, 1a, 39, 8.
6. See John Saward, The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), pp. 40-47.
7. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, trans. and ed. by Alexander Dru (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 157.
8.  St. Thomas, in explaining Dionysius’ statement that God “gives beauty to all created being in accord with the limitations of each,” says: “For there is one kind of beauty of the spirit and another of the body, and another of this and that body,” The Pocket Aquinas, p. 269.
9.  Quaestiones Disputatae De veritate 21.3.
10. Love is still primary in some way.  One person sees God more perfectly than another because of the degree of charity. See St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, Ia. 12, 6, co.
11. "The light ... stems from the object which, while revealing itself to the subject, it draws the subject into the sphere of the object." Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, p. 157.
12. ST, 1a2ae, 28.3.
13. Ibid., 1a2ae, 27.1, ad. 3: “The beautiful adds, over and above the good, a certain relation to the power of knowing; so that we call good that which simply pleases the appetite, but, we call beautiful that whose very apprehension pleases,” as quoted in Etienne Gilson, Elements of a Christian Philosophy (NewYork: Doubleday, 1963), p. 176.
14. Dionysius the Areopagite, Theologia mystica, from an address by John Paul II and quoted here according to “L'osservatore Romano,“ 26 January 2000, p. 11.
15. Johann G. Roten, S.M., "Mary and the Way of Beauty," Marian Studies (Annual Publication of the Mariological Society of America, Marian Library, Dayton University), XLIX (1998), 109-127.
16. Ibid., p. 116.
17. Ibid., pp. 116-117.  There is no intention here to suggest a plurality of forms.  Rather “form” is being used here according to the Theological Aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar and is not in opposition to the metaphysics of St. Thomas.  See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikskis; ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983).  For a consideration of form in relation to beauty see pp. 117-121.
18. Paul VI, Allocutio: “In auditorio Pontificii Athenaei a Sancto Antonio in Urbe ob coactos Conventus, VII Mariologicum atque XIV Marianum, 16 maii 1975," in AAS 67 (1975): 334-449, quoted here according to "Mary and the Way of Beauty," Marian Studies, p. 109.
19.      "In pre-modern times ... beauty was still synonymous with being.  With the Enlightenment, the concept of beauty changed.  The world was no longer considered the many-splendored form of God's creative genius but human artifact, that is, the sum total of human experimentation and productivity," ibid., p. 125.
20. Ibid., p. 119.
21. Sirach 24:18 (NAB). 

This Version: 27th July 2002
Copyright ©; Sr. Thomas Mary McBride, O.P. 2002

SOURCE: http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/mcbride/beauty.htm 

The Modern Divorce of Art and Prudence from Nature
Benedict Ashley

It would seem, therefore, that the modern obsession with creativity and the new is really an advance over the ancient obsession with the past. Unfortunately it also has a dark side, namely, that it has become a divorce of art and prudence from nature. I will not here enlarge on the neglect of the natural law basis of ethics and therefore of prudence, since that is a much discussed topic. Nor will I take up the question of ecology and environmentalism that concerns our cultures failure to respect the principle that art or technology should perfect nature not pollute or waste it. But I want to say something about the divorce of the fine arts from nature, because this is much less recognized as a problem. 
For Aristotle the fine arts are mimesis the "imitation of nature" a notion that again seems at odds with modernity's insistence on creativity as a remaking of nature in which the natural is overcome.(21) 
If we look to the history of art after the rise of Christianity we see that it first breathed a Christian meaning into the art of paganism that was based on mimesis. Then under the combined influences of Jewish iconoclasm and Neo-Platonist dualism it developed the symbolic art of Byzantine icons that respected nature but saw init only a symbol of the true spiritual world. (22) In the Middle Ages, however, the incarnational principle of grace perfecting nature began to emerge. In the Renaissance this was again combined with technologically advanced representation and the classical models in an idealizing art. With Protestant iconoclasm and the Enlightenment withdrawal from faith genre painting, landscape, and other secular subjects came to dominate yet often retained at least a moral symbolism. Finally in the nineteenth century the spiritual meaning of art tended to fade away. It was first replaced by Realism that in a positivistic way simply represent the facts of life without any deeper meaning. (23) 
As Realism it advanced it became Impressionism in which he object evaporated into mere phenomena that, in order to distinguish itself from photography, became more and more subjective. Finally at the beginning of the twentieth century Modern Art appeared in which representation of the object no longer governed the work of art but rather the subjectivity of the artist in Expressionism and the arbitrary rearrangement of objects in Cubism. This ultimately led to Abstract or Non-Objective art and ultimately to simple geometrical areas of color. A similar evolution took place in modernist literature. The dictum of Theodore Gautier that "the arts tend to the musical" is true in the sense that music has a formal beauty that by its association with the dance and the wordless sounds of the singing voice that accompany the dance is emotionally expressive. (24) 
Thus modern art criticism attacked representation and often settled for a meaningless formalism. Thus, as is evident in the work of perhaps the greatest of modernist painters, Picasso, who never succumbed to pure abstraction, what the modern art work really says is the assertion of the artists absolute freedom in creativity. Picasso worked in many media and changed his styles many times in order to show that he could do anything he wanted. (25) Thus a limitless freedom and meaningless novelty came to dominate the art of the twentieth century. 
In postmodernism this exaltation of novelty has collapsed in styles that are rhetorical rather than artistic in that their intent is to move the audience to political acts or at least to shock their complacency. Aristotle had insisted that the end of fine art is contemplation while persuasion to action pertains to the quite distinct art of rhetoric. (26) 
The conclusion of this historical sketch is that fine art must return to its own purpose of contemplating the true as it is rendered beautiful, that is accessible to our intuition through the senses. As we are learning that an abuse of technology leads to a destruction of the environment, the human body, and hence of the human community and the shared happiness of its members, so the abuse of the fine arts leads to a manipulation of paint and metal whose only meaning is the glorification of the novelty of the artist's imagination or enslavement to political agenda. There must be a return to mimesis.
Mimesis, or the "imitation of nature" that extends also to the imitation of human free action must not be thought of as simple photography or cinematic recording. It was that kind of "realism" that initiated the modern decline of the arts. What Aristotle intended by the word "imitation" was the perfecting of nature. This perfecting results from processes similar to the dialectic phase of the sciences, since it seeks to prepare for an intuition of the essential aspects of the world. The painter, for example, seeks to find the form of the object as it distinguishes the object from other objects. Sometimes the artist does this by caricaturing exaggeration, sometimes by an idealization, but what the artist seeks is the significant form freed from its meaningless, accidental features. This is especially evident in so-called "primitive" art such as that of Africa or Central America in which what the artist seeks to reveal is the awesome power of the gods. 
While it is true, as the formalists emphasized, that good art always seeks out "formal" that is mathematical relations, this is because mathematical relations, as in the models used by physicists, are the best analogates we have for significant non-mathematical relations. Thus even a painting of Modrian that seems as purely non-objective as it is possible to produce actually has emotional symbolism. (27) 
What I am arguing, therefore, is not that the modern art of the twentieth century was bad art, since much brilliant work was produced, but that its tendency has led to a dead end, because it more and more separated itself from nature. Thus like our technology that has failed to respect ecology, and our morality that has failed to respect the natural law, all in the name of creativity, that our goal is simply the "new" as if this is always the "improved," art has ended in deconstruction of reality not its perfecting, in the chaos of chance rather than of true freedom.

21. While commentators on the Poetics differ in their explanations of mimesis, it is from the preceding note that Aristotle understood this as a representation of the essential (universal) nature of a subject and its actions as they manifest this essence.. 
22. See Aiden Nichols, O.P., The Art of God Incarnate: Theology and Imag ein Christian Tradition (New York" Paulist Press, 1980, Chapter 5, "The vindication of the Icons," pp. 76-104. 
23. See Lind Nochlin, Realism (New York: Penguin Books, 1971). 
24. See my article," The Significance of Non-Objective Art", Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1965, 156-165. 
25. See Brigette Leal et al., The Ultimate Picasso (New York: Abrams, 2000). 
26. For Aristotle the art closing associated with the political is rhetoric, the art of persuasion to action, Rhetoric I, c. 1. It is paradoxical that critics attacked Soviet "realism" in art as mere propaganda lacking all artistic merit; yet, now that Communism, once the religion of bohemia, is dead, they praise art for its rhetorical promotion of political causes. 
27. For discussion on this issue as it was seen in the last part of the twentieth century see Dore Ashton, A Reading of Modern Art, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 

SOURCE: http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti01/ashley.htm 

On Art 
Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
 The word "art" has a range of meanings which may be obscured by the current disposition to use the word in an extremely restricted sense. In contemporary thought, art is most readily associated with beauty; yet its historic connections with utility and knowledge are probably more intimate and pervasive.
The prevalent popular association reflects a tendency in the 19th century to annex the theory of art to aesthetics. This naturally led to the identification of art with one kind of art -- the so-called "fine arts," "beaux arts" or "Schone Kunste" (arts of the beautiful). The contraction of meaning has gone so far that the word "art" sometimes signifies one group of the fine arts -- painting and sculpture -- as in the common phrase "literature, music, and the fine arts."
This restricted usage has become so customary that we ordinarily refer to a museum of art or to an art exhibit in a manner which seems to assume that the word "art" is exclusively the name for something which can be hung on a wall or placed on a pedestal.
A moment's thought will, of course, correct the assumption. We are not unfamiliar with the conception of medicine and teaching as arts. We are acquainted with such phrases as "the industrial arts" and "arts and crafts" in which the reference is to the production of useful things. Our discussions of liberal education should require us to consider the liberal arts which, however defined or enumerated, are supposed to constitute skills of mind. We recognize that "art" is the root of "artisan" as well as "artist." We thus discern the presence of skill in even the lowest forms of productive labor. Seeing it also as the root of "artifice" and "artificial," we realize that art is distinguished from and sometimes even opposed to nature.
The ancient and traditional meanings are all present in our daily vocabulary. In our thought the first connotation of "art" is fine art; in the thought of all previous eras the useful arts came first. As late as the end of the 18th century, Adam Smith follows the traditional usage which begins with Plato when, in referring to the production of a woolen coat, he says: "The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the woolcomber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production."
In the first great conversation on art -- that presented in the Platonic dialogues -- we find useful techniques and everyday skills typifying art, by reference to which all other skills are analyzed. Even when Socrates analyzes the art of the rhetorician, as in the Gorgias, he constantly turns to the productions of the cobbler and the weaver and to the procedures of the husbandman and the physician. If the liberal arts are praised as highest, because the logician or rhetorician works in the medium of the soul rather than in matter, they are called arts "only in a manner of speaking" and by comparison with the fundamental arts which handle physical material.
The Promethean gift of fire to men, which raised them from a brutish existence, carried with it various techniques for mastering matter -- the basic useful arts. Lucretius, writing in a line that goes from Homer through Thucydides and Plato to Bacon, Adam Smith, and Rousseau, attributes the progress of civilization and the difference between civilized and primitive society to the development of the arts and sciences. "Ships and tillage, walls, laws, arms, roads, dress, and all such like things, all the prizes, all the elegancies too of life without exception, poems, pictures, and the chiseling of fine-wrought statues, all these things practiced together with the acquired knowledge of the untiring mind taught men by slow degrees as they advanced on the way step by step."
At the beginning of this progress Lucretius places man's discovery of the arts of metalworking, domesticating animals, and cultivating the soil. "Metallurgy and agriculture," says Rousseau, "were the two arts which produced this great revolution" -- the advance from primitive to civilized life.
The fine arts and the speculative sciences come last, not first, in the progress of civilization.
The fine arts and the speculative sciences complete human life. They are not necessary -- except perhaps for the good life. They are the dedication of human leisure and its best fruit. The leisure without which they neither could come into being nor prosper is found for man and fostered by the work of the useful arts. Aristotle tells us that is "why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure."
There is another ambiguity in the reference of the word "art." Sometimes we use it to name the effects produced by human workmanship. We elliptically refer to works of art as art. Sometimes we use it to signify the cause of the things produced by human work -- that skill of mind which directs the hand in its manipulation of matter. Art is both in the artist and in the work of art -- in the one as cause, in the other as the effect. What is effected is a certain ennoblement of matter, a transformation produced not merely by the hand of man, but by his thought or knowledge.
The more generic meaning of art seems to be that of art as cause rather than as effect. There are many spheres of art in which no tangible product results, as in navigation or military strategy. We might, of course, call a landfall or a victory a work of art, but we tend rather to speak of the art of the navigator or the general. So, too, in medicine and teaching, we look upon the health or knowledge which results from healing or teaching as natural. We do not find art in them, but rather in the skill of the healer or teacher who has helped to produce that result. Hence even in the case of the shoe or the statue, art seems to be primarily in the mind and work of the cobbler or sculptor and only derivatively in the objects produced.
Aristotle, in defining art as a "capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning," identifies it with making as distinct from doing and knowing.
Though art, like science and moral action, belongs to the mind and involves experience and learning, imagination and thought, it is distinct from both in aiming at production, in being knowledge of how to make something or to obtain a desired effect. Science, on the other hand, is knowledge that something is the case, or that a thing has a certain nature. Knowledge is sometimes identified with science, to the exclusion of art or skill; but we depart from this narrow notion whenever we recognize that skill consists in knowing how to make something.
"Even in speculative matters," writes Aquinas, "there is something by way of work; e.g., the making of a syllogism, or a fitting speech, or the work of counting or measuring. Hence whatever habits are ordained to suchlike works of the speculative reason, are, by a kind of comparison, called arts indeed, but liberal arts, in order to distinguish them from those arts which are ordained to works done by the body, which arts are, in a fashion, servile, inasmuch as the body is in servile subjection to the soul, and man as regards his soul is free. On the other hand, those sciences which are not ordained to any suchlike work, are called sciences simply, and not arts."
The discussion of medicine in the great books throws light on the relation of art and science, in their origin as well as their development. Hippocrates writes of medicine as both an art and a science.
In his treatise on Ancient Medicine, he says, "It appears to me necessary to every physician to be skilled in nature, and strive to know -- if he would wish to perform his duties -- what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink, and to his other occupations, and what are the effects of each of them on every one. And it is not enough to know simply that cheese is a bad article of food, as disagreeing with whoever eats of it to satiety, but what sort of disturbance it creates, and wherefore, and with what principle in man it disagrees .... Whoever does not know what effect these things produce upon a man, cannot know the consequences which result from them, nor how to apply them."
As a science, medicine involves knowledge of the causes of disease, the different kinds of diseases, and their characteristic courses. Without such knowledge, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy would be a matter of guesswork -- of chance, as Hippocrates says -- or at best the application of rule-of-thumb in the light of past experience.
But the scientific knowledge does not by itself make a man a healer, a practitioner of medicine. The practice of medicine requires art in addition to science -- art based on science, but going beyond science in formulating general rules for the guidance of practice in particular cases. The habit of proceeding according to rules derived from science distinguishes for Galen the artist in medicine from the mere empiric.
The antithesis of artist and empiric -- suggesting the contrast between operation by tested rule and operation by trial and error -- parallels the antithesis between scientist and man of opinion.
It has seldom, if ever, been suggested that an art can be originally discovered or developed apart from some science of the subject matter with which the art deals. This does not mean that an individual cannot acquire the habit of an art without being taught the relevant scientific knowledge. An art can be learned by practice; skill can be formed by repeated acts. But the teacher of an art cannot direct the learning without setting rules for his pupils to follow; and if the truth or intelligibility of the rules is questioned, the answers will come from the science underlying the art.
According to Kant, "every art presupposes rules which are laid down as the foundation which first enables a product if it is to be called one of art, to be represented as possible." In the case of "fine art," which he distinguishes from other kinds of art as being the product of "genius," Kant claims that it arises only from "a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given." Yet he maintains that a "rule" is still at its basis and may be "gathered from the performance, i.e., from the product, which others may use to put their own talent to the test."
Granting that there is no art without science, is the reverse true, and is science possible without art? The question has two meanings. First, are there arts peculiarly indispensable to the development of science? Second, does every science generate a correlative art and through it work productively?
Traditionally, the liberal arts have been considered indispensable to science. This has been held to be particularly true of logic. Because they were intended to serve as the instrument or the art for all the sciences, Aristotle's logical treatises, which constitute the first systematic treatment of the subject, deserve the title Organon which they traditionally carry. Bacon's Novum Organum was in one sense an effort to supply a new logic or art for science, and to institute a renovation of the sciences by the experimental method.
As an art, logic consists of rules for the conduct of the mind in the processes of inquiry, inference, definition, and demonstration, by which sciences are constructed. Scientific method is, in short, the art of getting scientific knowledge. In the experimental sciences, there are auxiliary arts -- arts controlling the instruments or apparatus employed in experimentation. The experiment itself is a work of art, combining many techniques and using many products of art: the water-clock, the inclined plane, and the pendulum of Galileo; the prisms, mirrors, and lenses of Newton.
The second question -- whether all sciences have related arts and through them productive power -- raises one of the great issues about the nature of scientific knowledge.
For Francis Bacon, and to some extent Descartes, art is the necessary consequence of science. At the beginning of the Novum Organum, Bacon declares that "knowledge and human power are synonymous since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect; for nature is only subdued by submission, and that which in contemplative philosophy corresponds with the cause, in practical science becomes the rule." The distinction Bacon makes here between the speculative and practical parts of knowledge corresponds to the distinction between science and art, or as we sometimes say, "pure and applied science." He opposes their divorce from one another. If science is the indispensable foundation of art and consists in a knowledge of causes, art in Bacon's view is the whole fruit of science, for it applies that knowledge to the production of effects.
His theory of science and his new method for development are directed to the establishment of man's "empire over creation" which "is founded on the arts and sciences alone."
Just as the present state of the arts accounts for "the immense difference between men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe, and in any wild and barbarous region of the new Indies," so further advances in science promise the untold power of new inventions and techniques.
On Bacon's view, not only the value, but even the validity, of scientific knowledge is to be measured by its productivity. A useless natural science -- a science of nature which cannot be used to control nature -- is unthinkable. With the exception of mathematics, every science has its appropriate magic or special productive power. Even metaphysics, in Bacon's conception of it, has its "true natural magic, which is that great liberty and latitude of operation which dependeth upon the knowledge of forms."
The opposite answer to the question about science and art is given by Plato, Aristotle, and others who distinguish between speculative and productive sciences. They differ from Bacon on the verbal level by using the word "practical" for those sciences which concern moral and political action rather than the production of effects. The sciences Bacon calls "practical" they call "productive," but under either name these are the sciences of making rather than doing -- sciences which belong in the sphere of art rather than prudence. But the significant difference lies in the evaluation of the purely speculative sciences which consist in knowledge for its own sake, divorced from art and morals, or from the utilities of production and the necessities of action.
In tracing the history of the sciences, Aristotle notes that those men who first found the useful arts were thought wise and superior. "But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches did not aim at utility. Hence, when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure . . . So that the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the man of experience, the master-worker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive."
That the theoretic sciences are useless, in the sense of not providing men with the necessities or pleasures of life, is a mark of their superiority. They give what is better than such utility -- the insight and understanding which constitute wisdom.
The Baconian reply condemns the conception that there can be knowledge which is merely contemplation of the truth. It announces the revolution which, for John Dewey, ushered in the modern world. The pragmatic theory of knowledge had its origin in a conception of science at every point fused with art.
The ancients, trying to understand the natural phenomena of change and generation, found that the processes of artistic production provided them with an analytic model. Through understanding how he himself worked in making things, man might come to know how nature worked.
When a man makes a house or a statue, he transforms matter. Changes in shape and position occur. The plan or idea in the artist's mind comes, through his manipulation of matter, to be embodied and realized objectively. To the ancients a number of different causes or factors seemed to be involved in every artistic production -- material to be worked on; the activity of the artist at work; the form in his mind which he sought to impose on the matter, thus transforming it; and the purpose which motivated his effort.
In the medical tradition from Aristotle through Galen to Harvey, there is constant emphasis upon the artistic activity of nature. Galen continually argues against those who do not conceive Nature as an artist. Harvey consciously compares the activity of nature in biological generation to that of an artist. "Like a potter she first divides her material, and then indicates the head and trunk and extremities; like a painter, she first sketches the parts in outline, and then fills them in with colours; or like the shipbuilder, who first lays down his keel by way of foundation, and upon this raises the ribs and roof or deck: even as he builds his vessel does nature fashion the trunk of the body and add the extremities."
Of all natural changes, the one most closely resembling artistic production appears to be generation, especially the production of living things by living things. In both cases, a new individual seems to come into being. But upon further examination, artistic production and natural generation reveal significant differences -- differences which divide nature from art.

SOURCE: http://radicalacademy.com/adleronart1.htm 

Aquinas considers both and distinguishes them in his analysis of divine causation. In things not generated by chance, he points out that there are two different ways in which the form that is in the agent is passed on to another being. "In some agents the form of the thing to be made preexists according to its natural being, as in those that act by their nature; as a man generates a man, or fire generates fire. Whereas in other agents the form of the thing to be made preexists according to intelligible being, as in those that act by the intellect; and thus the likeness of a house preexists in the mind of the builder. And this may be called the idea of the house, since the builder intends to build his house like to the form conceived in his mind."
Thus in biological procreation the progeny have the form of their parents -- a rabbit producing a rabbit, a horse, a horse. But in artistic production, the product has, not the form of the artist, but the form he has conceived in his mind and which he seeks to objectify.
Furthermore, in generation, and in other natural changes as well, the matter which undergoes change seems to have in itself a tendency to become what it changes into, as for example the acorn naturally tends to become an oak, whereas the oaken wood does not have in itself any tendency to become a chair or a bed. The material the artist works on is entirely passive with respect to the change he wishes to produce. The artistic result is in this sense entirely of his making.
The realm of art, or of the artificial, is then opposed to the natural and differentiated from it. Kant, for whom art is distinguished from nature "as making is from acting or operating in general," claims that "by right, it is only production through freedom, i.e., through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action, that should be termed art." Consequently, art is that which would not have come into being without human intervention.
The man-made object is produced by man, not in any way, but specifically by his intelligence, by the reason which makes him free.
Animals other than man are apparently productive, but the question is whether they can be called "artists." "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells.
But," according to Marx, "what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
"At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which must subordinate his will."
Some writers, like Montaigne, attribute the productivity of animals to reason rather than instinct. Art then ceases to be one of man's distinctions from the brutes.
But if man alone has reason, and if the productions of art are works of reason, then those who refer to animals as artists speak metaphorically, on the basis of what Kant calls "an analogy with art . . . As soon as we call to mind," he continues, "that no rational deliberation forms the basis of the labor, we see at once that it is a product of their nature (of instinct), and it is only to the Creator that we ascribe it as art."
This in turn leads to the question whether nature itself is a work of art. "Let me suppose," the Eleatic Stranger says in the Sophist, "that things which are said to be made by nature are the work of divine art, and that things which are made by man out of these are the work of human art. And so there are two kinds of making and production, the one human and the other divine."
If we suppose that the things of nature are originally made by a divine mind, how does their production differ from the work of human artists, or from biological generation? One answer, given in Plato's Timaeus, conceives the original production of things as a fashioning of primordial matter in the patterns set by the eternal archetypes or ideas. In consequence, the divine work would be more like human artistry than either would be like natural reproduction. The emanation of the world from the One, according to Plotinus, and the production of things out of the substance of God in Spinoza's theory, appear, on the other hand, to be more closely analogous to natural generation than to art.
Both analogies -- of creation with art and with generation -- are dismissed as false by Christian theologians. God's making is absolutely creative. It presupposes no matter to be formed; nor do things issue forth from God's own substance, but out of nothing.
Thus Augustine asks: "How didst Thou make the heaven and the earth?" And he answers: "It was not as a human artificer, forming one body from another, according to the discretion of his mind, which can in some way invest with such a form, as it seeth in itself by its inward eye . . . Verily, neither in the heaven, nor in the earth, didst Thou make heaven and earth; nor in the air, or waters, seeing these also belong to the heaven and the earth; nor in the whole world didst Thou make the whole world; because there was no place where to make it, before it was made, that it might be . . . For what is, but because Thou art? Therefore Thou spakest, and they were made, and in Thy Word Thou madest them." According to this view, human art cannot be called creative, and God cannot be called an artist, except metaphorically.
But here we must observe that, according to the view we take of the similitude between human and divine workmanship, the line we are able to draw the between the realms of art and nature becomes shadowy or sharp.
The discussions of art in the great books afford materials from which a systematic classification of the arts might be constructed, but only fragments of such a classification are ever explicitly presented.
For example, the seven liberal arts are enumerated by various authors, but their distinction from other arts, and their ordered relation to one another, do not receive full explication. There is no treatment of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (or dialectic) to parallel Plato's consideration of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy in the Republic; nor is there any analysis of the relation of the first three arts to the other four -- traditionally organized as the trivium and the quadrivium. However, in Augustine's work On Christian Doctrine we have a discussion of these arts as they are ordered to the study of theology. That orientation of the liberal arts is also the to theme of Bonaventura's Reduction of the Arts to Theology.
The principles of classification of the fine arts are laid down by Kant from "the analogy which art bears to the mode of expression of which men avail themselves in speech, with a view to communicating themselves to one another as completely as possible." Since such expression "consists in word, gesture, and tone," he finds three corresponding fine arts: "the art of speech, formative art, and the art of the play of sensations." In these terms he analyzes rhetoric and poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting and landscape gardening, and music.
A different principle of division is indicated in the opening chapters of Aristotle's Poetics. The principle that all art imitates nature suggests the possibility of distinguishing and relating the various arts according to their characteristic differences as imitations -- by reference to the object imitated and to the medium and manner in which it is imitated by the poet, sculptor or painter, and musician.
"Color and form," Aristotle writes, "are used as means by some ... who imitate and portray many things by their aid, and the voice is used by others ... Rhythm alone, without harmony, is the means in the dancer's imitations ... There is, further, an art which imitates by language alone, without harmony, in prose or in verse." Aristotle's treatise deals mainly with this art -- poetry; it does not develop for the other fine arts the analysis it suggests.
Aristotle's principle also suggests questions about the useful arts. Are such arts as shoemaking and house-building imitations of nature in the same sense as poetry and music? Does the way in which the farmer, the physician, and the teacher imitate nature distinguish these three arts from the way in which a statue is an imitation, or poem, or a house?
The Aristotelian dictum about art imitating nature has, of course, been as frequently challenged as approved. Apart from the issue of its truth, the theory of art as imitation poses many questions which Aristotle left unanswered. If there are answers in the great books, they are there by implication rather than by statement.
The most familiar distinction between arts -- that between the useful and the fine -- is also the one most frequently made in modern discussion. The criterion of the distinction needs little explanation. Some of man's productions are intended to be used; others to be contemplated or enjoyed. To describe them in terms of imitation, the products of the useful arts must be said to imitate a natural function (the shoe, for example, the protective function of calloused skin). The imitation merely indicates the use, and it is the use which counts. But in the products of the fine arts, the imitation of the form, quality, or other aspect of a natural object is considered to be the source of pleasure.
The least familiar distinction among the arts is implied in any thorough discussion, yet its divisions are seldom, if ever, named. Within the sphere of useful art, some arts work toward a result which can hardly be regarded as an artificial product. Fruits and grains would grow without the intervention of the farmer, yet the farmer helps them to grow more abundantly and regularly. Health and knowledge are natural effects, even though the arts of medicine and teaching may aid in their production.
These arts, stand in sharp contrast to those skills whereby man produces the useful things which, but for man's work, would be totally lacking. In the one case, it is the artist's activity itself which imitates or cooperates with nature's manner of working; in the other, the things which the artist makes by operating on passive materials supplied by nature imitate natural forms or functions.
For the most part, the industrial arts are of the second sort. They transform dead matter into commodities or tools. The arts which cooperate with nature usually work with living matter, as in agriculture, medicine, and teaching. The distinction seems warranted and clear. Yet it is cut across by Adam Smith's division of labor into productive and nonproductive. The work of agriculture is associated with industry in the production of wealth, but what ever other use they may have, physicians and teachers, according to Smith, do not directly augment the wealth of nations.
If to the foregoing we add the division of the arts into liberal and servile, the major traditional distinctions are covered. This last division had its origin in the recognition that some arts, like sculpture and carpentry, could not effect their products except by shaping matter, whereas some arts, like poetry or logic were free from matter, at least in the sense than they worked productively in symbolic mediums.
But by other principles of classification, poetry and sculpture are separated from logic and carpentry, as fine from useful art. Logic along with grammar, rhetoric, and the mathematical arts, is separated from poetry and sculpture, as liberal from fine art. When the word "liberal" is used to state this last distinction, its meaning narrows. It signifies only the speculative arts, or arts concerned with processes of thinking and knowing.
The adequacy of any classification, and the intelligibility of its principles, must stand the test of questions about particular arts. The great books frequently discuss the arts of animal husbandry and navigation, the arts of cooking and hunting, the arts of war and government. Each raises a question about the nature of art in general, and challenges any analysis of the arts to classify them and explain their peculiarities.
There are two other major issues which have been debated mainly with respect to the fine arts.
One, already mentioned, concerns the imitative character of art. The opponents of imitation do not deny that there may be some perceptible resemblance between a work of art a natural object. A drama may remind us of human actions we have experienced; music may simulate the tonal qualities and rhythms of the human voice registering the course of the emotions. Nevertheless, the motivation of artistic creation lies deeper, it is said, than a desire to imitate nature, or to find some pleasure in such resemblances.
According to Tolstoy, the arts serve primarily as a medium of spiritual communication, helping to create the ties of human brotherhood. According to Freud, it is emotion or subconscious expression, rather than imitation or communication, which is the deepest spring of art; the poet or artist "forces us to become aware of our inner selves in which the same impulses are still extant even though they suppressed." Freud's theory of sublimation of emotion or Desiree through art seems to connect with Aristotle's theory of emotional catharsis or purgation. But Freud is attempting to account for the origin of art, and Aristotle is trying to describe an effect proper to its enjoyment.
The theories of communication, expression, or imitation, attempt to explain art, or at least its motivation. But there is also a conception of art which, foregoing explanation, leaves it a mystery -- the spontaneous product of inspiration, of a divine madness, the work of unfathomable genius. We encounter this notion first, but not last, in Plato's Ion.
The other major controversy concerns the regulation of the arts by the state for human welfare and the public good.
Here, as before, the fine arts (chiefly poetry and music) have been the focus of the debate. It is worth noting, however, that a parallel problem of political regulation occurs in the sphere of the industrial arts. On the question of state control over the production and distribution of wealth, Smith and Marx represent extreme opposites, as Milton and Plato are poles apart on the question of the state's right to censor the artist's work. In this debate, Aristotle stands on Plato's side in many particulars, and Mill with Milton.
The problem of censorship or political regulation of the fine arts presupposes some prior questions. Plato argues in the Republic that all poetry but "hymns to the gods and praises of famous men" must be banned from the State; "for if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed the best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State."
Such a view presupposes a certain theory of the fine arts and of their influence on the citizens and the whole character of the community. Yet because both Plato and Aristotle judge that influence to be far from negligible, they do not see any reason in individual liberty for the state to refrain from interfering with the rights of the artist for the greater good of the community.
To Milton and Mill, the measure of the artist's influence does not affect the question of the freedom of the arts from political or ecclesiastical interference. While admitting the need for protecting the interests of peace and public safety, Milton demands: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
The issue for them is entirely one of liberty. They espouse the cause of freedom -- for the artist to express or communicate his work and for the community to receive from him whatever he has to offer.

Source: http://radicalacademy.com/adleronart2.htm 

Æsthetics
G Gietmann

Æsthetics may be defined as a systematic training to right thinking and right feeling in matters of art, and is made a part of philosophy by A.G. Baumgarten. Its domain, according to Wolff's system, is that of indistinct presentations and the canons of sensuous taste (aisthetike techne, from aisthanesthai, to preceive and feel). It has, however, developed into a philosophy of the beautiful in nature and art, and, finally, into a science of the (fine) arts based on philosophical principles. Natural beauty, particular works of art, pure, that is, not sensual, beauty, and philosophical questions are sometimes treated thoroughly, sometimes merely touched upon. Applied aesthetics is the accurate description and valuation of particular works of art; technical aesthetics, the training of the art-student in individual productions; art-history, the continuous record of the development of art, according to a definite plan. It is the duty of aesthetics always to seek the deepest grounds of the pleasure derived from art, not only in the laws of nature, but, above all, in those of the mind, and thus to come in touch with philosophy; but the fruitful source of sound judgment is to be found in a correct view of the world of art itself. The student of aesthetics, though he cannot wholly dispense with an insight into the technique of artistic production, or with a knowledge of the varied manifestations of beauty in nature and life, or even with an actual exercise of one kind of art or another, must rely Chiefly on a quick perceptive faculty, systematizing talent, and an intelligent appreciation. In this respect aesthetics will, on the one hand, offer more, on the other hand, less than "technical treatises" on any one art, practical instruction in the exercise of the same, or illustrated art books for everyone. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ÆSTHETICS
AEsthetics, as a general science, takes no account of the individual arts. It, investigates the physiological and psychological principles of art, the conceptions of art, of beauty, and of the beautiful in art, and develops the universal laws of artistic activity. Clear and orderly thinking, the presupposition of all scientific discussion, is indispensable in aesthetics, the more so because, otherwise, aimless circumlocution and serious errors are unavoidable. All ideas, moreover, concerning aesthetic beauty and the aim of art need to be carefully examined into. Finally, the subjective conditions of the artist, his relation to nature, and the division and classification of the material that lies to his hand must be taken into account. 
THE SCIENCE OF THE ARTS
In a history of art only the imitative arts and, possibly, music are, as a rule, included; aesthetics, on the other hand, takes in the arts of oratory as well, though mere eloquence, because of its eminently practical character, is generally omitted. Originally, aesthetics was chiefly occupied with poetry, the laws of which are the most easily explained. With poetry the ancillary arts of rhythm and acting are inseparably connected. If vocal music be added to these, we have all those which are the direct, though transient, outcome of voice and gesture. Man, however, soon progresses to the use of musical instruments and gives his artistic productions a permanent existence by means of written notes or marks. The constructive arts, on the other hand, always make use of extraneous material, such as color, wood, stone, or metal, with results that are not at the same time complete and visible. The graphic and textile arts are grouped with that of painting; with sculpture, ceramics, relief-work, and every kind of engraving; the lesser decorative arts with painting and architecture. The aesthetics of the individual arts does not bear the abstract impress of aesthetics in general; for although it everywhere seeks out the deeper-lying principles of aesthetic satisfaction, it often invades the domain of art-history in search of illustration, in order to prove the laws of art by means of Characteristic types. 
SYSTEMS AND METHODS
This peculiar method of dealing with the subject ensures to AEsthetics the position of an independent and valuable science. For this reason various methods and systems have grown up in it, as in art itself, which lay stress on one aspect rather than on another. Idealism loves great subjects, a lofty conception, monumental execution; it looks to find the divine and the spiritual in all things, be it only allegorically and symbolically. It treats aesthetics from above, and guards most effectually against the debasement of art, but is exposed (as was Platonism in philosophy) to the risk of losing itself in abstraction and, moreover, of not giving due importance to the form of art. With aesthetic formalism, on the contrary, this is the most important matter; it does not ask What, but How; it does not look at the content, but at the form which the artist gives it. It defines what forms are "pleasing" in the absolute sense; that is, combine to make up the image of beauty. When, moreover, it goes beyond experience, and confirms the verdict of the senses by that of the mind, it draws, with perfect justice, the characteristic distinction between artistic conception and scientific treatment. Form, however, without content would be empty; it should be rather, as it were, the blossoming of the idea, and a great subject, unless, indeed, it surpass the powers of the artist, gives his genius an impulse towards the highest possible expression. Realism brings into prominence only the truth and palpable actuality of this content. It sets art on a sure foundation and opens the treasures of the visible world of matter. It brings art into living relationship with life and nature, with national characteristics and current ideas, and leads it, through the favoring influence of artistic industries, into the home life of the people. This system, however, does not always safeguard the true worth of the highest art, whose part it is not to imitate, but to idealize reality, to seek its materials in the world of ideas as well as in that of phenomena; which sets a greater, unchangeable truth side by side with one which is lower in this world of experience, and does not, to take one example, regard, after the coarser manner of realistic art, mere fishermen of Galilee, in working garb and With Jewish features, as true and fitting presentations of the Lord's Apostles. It may, therefore, be said with a measure of truth that the chief task of art begins precisely at the point where the truth of nature reaches its perfection. Naturalism, again, goes much further than Realism, in that it not only insists on fidelity to nature, to the point 6f illusion, in all arts, whether of painting, drama, romance, or other, but also suppresses as far as possible all that is spiritual or supersensuous. Relapse into merest sensuousness becomes, in such case, inevitable. Not anatomical and organic fidelity of presentation, but the nude, with its allurement, then easily becomes of chief importance, and the artistic conception sinks likewise, with regard to other things, to the level of crude naturalism and sensuous pleasure. In so far, however, as Naturalism holds aloof from this abyss, it champions the autonomy of art in order to maintain its independence of religion and morality. It thereby sets itself in open contradiction to Christianity; since all things human, even art, are subject to the eternal law. Artistic expression is indeed neither the act of a blindly toiling genius nor that of an understanding governed by its own laws, but is the act of a free, responsible will. It affects not only the sight and perception of the spectator, but also his mental disposition and his will. It is in this respect that the laws of morality apply to art as a practical calling. Likewise, as against Naturalism, a moral and religious aim in art must be recognized. "Art is its own aim" (art for art's sake), is a principle which holds true only of the immediate or inner aim (finis operis). The work must of course, above all, comply with the laws of the art in order to be a complete work of art. But it may, even so, serve other ends, such as the mental and religious betterment of mankind, and, above all, the glory of God. The systems hitherto referred to are old, and have their source in certain fundamental views of art; those which follow owe their origin rather to reflection and reaction. The names: "Classicism", "Byzantinism", "Orientalism", "Romanticism", "Archaism" and even "Renaissance" (in the ordinary sense of the word) indicate certain tendencies of art, and of aesthetics, which discern the conditions of progress in a reversion to earlier periods of art-development. Witness the aesthetic conceptions of the "Nazarenes", who laid stress on the poetic, national, and religious temper, in contradistinction to academic stiffness and classical coldness, and who, therefore, reverted to the Italian art of the fifteenth century (the Overbeck school). These ideas exercised an important influence upon the Christian art of Germany, down to the period of Steinle and the Düsseldorf school. Pre-Raphaelitism shares with the Nazarenes their predilection for the Early Renaissance, with its fresh-blossoming, freely-evolving simplicity; shares still more their distaste for a narrowing routine and a conventional uniformity. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais), made noteworthy by Ruskin's writings on the subject; sought to give English art a greater independence, fidelity to nature, and poetic spirit, by linking it to the "primitive" painters of Italy. This tendency, which showed itself somewhat earlier than the middle of the nineteenth century, endured, under the name of Æstheticism, partly in England, and partly in. America, until the end of the last century (Burne-Jones, William Morris). Its representatives sought chiefly the oldest and best forms of art, and devoted themselves, not Without eccentricities, to furniture and draperies. "Individualism" seeks salvation not in history, but in denial of the historical. It is the so-called "Secession", however, which has attracted most attention. Having at first been mainly a social movement of revolt (in Munich), it has tended to eschew learning and aspired to create all things anew, with results which are sometimes original, sometimes astonishing, and occasionally ludicrous. Whether the new style sought for will develop from this, is more than doubtful; never, certainly, from the purely negative theory of the tendency, since it tends to do away with ideas, form, and style. Yet this striving after new forms is not without a certain justification. A somewhat widespread theory, which may be called "Akallism", rejects the old doctrine of the beauty of a true work of art, and aims to set that which has character, or meaning, in the place of the beautiful. As a matter of fact, nearly all writers on aesthetics have made the idea of beauty the foundation of the whole system, and even Jungmann found it impossible to devise a symmetrical system of aesthetics without that idea. There is no need to deny the possibility of devising such a system, but the witness of history is on the side of the so-called aesthetics of beauty. Akallism, however, as a rule, aims at replacing the beautiful not by the great, but by that which is strikingly characteristic, or brutally realistic. Subjectivism threatens scientific aesthetics with an entirely new danger. The forcible emphasis of the subjective side of art, and of the psychological and physiological conditions of artistic expression, is undoubtedly an advance -- provided objective conditions and norms suffer no diminution of their rightful sphere. Yet there is a growing tendency to regard all aesthetic principles and judgments as mere fluctuating opinions, and reject all that constitutes system, principle, or definition. Such skepticism, born of spiritual weakness and cowardice, makes an end, once for all, of all science. 
A word must be added here concerning the various methods of aesthetics. The older, abstract, treatment of the subject is no longer available, in view of the abundant facilities which perception now has at its disposal. Mere sense-training, however, leads, in its turn, to very superficial knowledge; it is the chief function of perception to prepare the way for mental insight and ideal conception. Nor can we dispense with either the systematic arrangement of the history of art, or the quasi-philosophical basis of aesthetics. The introduction of natural-science methods into aesthetics (Taine, Grant Allen, Helmholtz, Fechner), as well as the close connection between theoretical and practical instruction, and artistic expression (Ruskin), offers great advantages, if not relied on exclusively. At the same time, it remains true that high art can never be wholly dissected by the methods of the exact sciences, but rather itself lays down in turn the governing norms which art expression should follow and, having once attained its proper perfection, is not longer dependent on such expression. The proper subject; therefore, of aesthetics is the great arts; the technique and the theories of the lesser arts have a narrower range of material. As a matter of method, it is advisable to set poetry in the foreground of any discussion concerning art, since it is thereby easier to keep the aesthetics of the other arts from becoming mere technique. 
HISTORY OF ÆSTHETICS
Socrates, in Xenophon's "Memorabilia" and "Symposium", makes no distinction between the good and the beautiful, and the same indefiniteness extends to Plato's philosophy (The Republic, Phaedrus, Philebus) and that of Plotinus (Ennead, I, vi). The idealism of this philosophy not only gave rise to the work of Longinus concerning "The Sublime", but also inspired Dionysius the Areopagite (De Divinis Nominibus) and several Fathers of the Church. Aristotle, on the other hand, gravely analyzed the form and properties of the beautiful as, in his "Poetics", he analyzed the art of epic, tragic, and comic poetry. The acute incidental comments of St. Thomas Aquinas are chiefly confined to the notion of the beautiful and of art, and to the artistic idea. The systematic treatment of aesthetics begins with A. G. Baumgarten's "AEsthetica" (1750-58). However little philosophical value his canons of taste, founded on "confused ideas" and "sensitive perceptions" may possess, as a matter of fact, his book had a stronger influence upon the further development of aesthetics than both English and French philosophy had prior to his time. The former, starting from a Platonic idealism, sank further and further into empiricism and sensualism, and insisted, not too philosophically, on the principle of common sense (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, Hume, Burke). Hogarth devoted himself to painting and proposed as the "line of beauty" the curve which bears his name. Among the French, Batteux, following Aristotle, devised a system of the fine arts, which, however, clung somewhat too closely to the principle of imitating nature. Diderot did the same to an even more marked extent, whereas the later French aesthetics approximated to idealism (Cousin). In Germany aesthetics came to be treated of with much zeal after Baumgarten's time, both in a philosophical and in a popular fashion. To allude here only to the first, the art-critics Winckelmann and Lessing were among the numerous followers of the Baumgarten school, the former directing his special attention to the art of sculpture. Kant, again, obtained great influence, and, though his pet theory, that beauty is merely a subjective, formal fitness, found no followers, he stimulated activity in many quarters by means of self-contradictory concatenation of various systems. From him, then, is derived the abstract idealism of Schelling and Schopenhauer, wherein the general idea of beauty is not sufficiently absorbed in the form of its manifestation. Concrete idealism also (that of Hegel and Schleiermacher) owes its origin to Kant. It regards beauty not as a universal idea, but as an individual-evolution. To him, too, may be traced the aesthetic formalism of Herbart and Zimmermann, and "aesthetics of feeling" (Kirchmann). 

HEGEL, Vorlesungen uber die Æsthetik (Berlin, 1835-38); TH. VISCHER, Æsthetik, oder Wissenschaft des Schonen (Reutlingen, 1846-57); DEUTINGER, Kunstlehre (Ratisbon, 1845); KOSTLIN, Æsthetik (Tubingen, 1863-68); CARRIERE, Æsthetik (Leipzig, 1885); IDEM, Die Kunst im Zusammenhange der Kulturentwicklung (3d ed. Leipzig, 1877-86); ZIMMERMANN, Æsthetik als Formwissenschaft (Vienna, 1865); JUNGMANN, Æsthetik (3d ed., Freiburg, Baden, 1886); KONR. LANCE, Wesen der Kunst (1901); GIETMANN-SORENSEN, Kunstlehre (Freiburg, Baden, 1899-1903). In England RUSKIN'S Modern Painters has had a wide circulation, as have his other numerous works. The following French works may be mentioned: SUTTER, Esthetique generale et appliquee (Paris, 1865); LONGHAYE, Theorie des belles lettres (Paris, 1885). 
For the history of aesthetics: MULLER, Gesch. der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alten (Breslau, 1834-37); ZIMMERMANN, Gesch. der Æsthetik (Vienna, 1858); SCHASLER, Kritische Gesch. der Æsthetik (Berlin, 1872); VON HARTMANN, Die deutsche Æsthetik seit Kant (Leipzig, 1886). 
For the history of Art: KRAUS, Gesch. der christl. Kunst (Freiburg, Baden, 1896-97); SPRINGER, Handb. der Kunstgesch. (6th ed., Leipzig, 1901-2); KUHN, Allgem. Kunstgesch. (Einsiedeln, 1891, incomplete in 1906); WOESMANN, Gesch. der Kunst aller Zeiten u. Volker (Leipzig, 1905) not yet complete. 

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume I
Copyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. Knight
Nihil Obstat, March 1, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

SOURCE: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01174c.htm 

Kant and the "Critique of Judgment"
Radical Academy

Both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason have established a dualism -- of phenomenon and noumenon, of the sensible and suprasensible, the conditional and unconditional, mechanical necessity and liberty. No acceptable philosophy can conclude with such a dualism, for the ego is at one and the same time the subject of both the theoretical and the practical world. Hence it is necessary that the two aspects -- theoretical and practical -- through which reality is revealed, be synthesized in a unity centering in the ego.
Kant maintains that such a synthesis is possible through the judgment of sentiment, the study of which he presents in the Critique of Judgment. The judgment of sentiment is not to be confused with the synthetic a priori judgment already considered in the Critique of Pure Reason. This latter presupposes an empty or void form of the intellect (category), which is determined by the particular element grasped by the sense. Hence Kant calls the synthetic a priori judgment a determining judgment, and it is that which gives us true and proper but phenomenal knowledge.
The judgment of sentiment, on the other hand, consists in referring the apprehended object to a form that is not in the intellect, but in the affective power of the will (emotion). The form which appears in sentiment is intermediate between the theoretical and the practical. Such a judgment of sentiment is possible because the subject (the ego), by reflecting on the apprehended data, judges these data to be adapted to the sentimental activities of the subject. Hence Kant calls this operation a reflecting judgment. It is to be noted that the reflecting judgment has its origin outside the a priori forms of the intellect. Consequently, it does not give us true and proper knowledge, but only manifests an exigency of the ego.
In the Critique of Judgment Kant presents only two reflecting judgments -- that which arises from the finality of nature, and that which is called aesthetic.

1.	Teleological Judgment

The creative activity of nature develops itself in a successive series of phenomena connected with one another mechanically, that is, through the laws of causality. Reflecting upon this mechanical succession, one soon notes that the individual elements of the series are harmoniously coordinated toward a common end, as if the parts were disposed by a regulating Mind for the actuation of a determined purpose (finality). Such a finality can be observed especially in living organisms, in which it is easy to note how the parts develop toward the production of the perfect living organism.
Kant extends this view to the whole of nature and sees it culminating in the advent of spirituality, which is to be attained through culture and civilization, technical abilities and moral education. This teleological view, in which we consider the world of beings and of events as ordained to an end and ultimately to our spiritual exigencies, finds its reason in sentiment and not in the intellect. As in the Critique of Practical Reason, the solution is found in an exigency of the unconditioned, and not in the knowledge of the unconditioned.

2.	Aesthetic Judgment

Aesthetic judgment, by which we judge an object to be pleasurable, begins by our separating the object from every determined concept and from every practical interest, and by referring the object thus freed to the subject. The subject then finds the satisfaction of its spiritual faculties in the object thus referred to it and expresses this satisfaction in an aesthetic judgment: "This field is beautiful." In aesthetic judgment, therefore, there is lacking (1) all judgment of knowledge (e.g., "This field is broad"), and (2) all judgment of interest (e.g., "This field is useful for grazing cattle").
The object of an aesthetic judgment is the "form" of the object considered in itself (e.g., the composition of colors in a landscape) and referred to the subject. The subject finds therein the satisfaction of his spiritual faculties. In becoming aware of aesthetic pleasure, the subject (ego) feels himself free of any theoretical or practical interest; he feels himself to be one, a person, the subject of spiritual activity. Thus we are in the sphere of the unconditioned. It is to be noted that aesthetic judgment is not true knowledge. It is an exigency of the subject expressing his aesthetic sentiment in the manner described.

SOURCE: http://radicalacademy.com/philkant2.htm#judgment